We need to talk about boundaries...

Rating: 8/10 (3 February 2013)

An animated film centered around a large group of monsters featuring the voice talents of the Happy Madison gang wasn't a premise that instantly triggered my interest, however, I'm reporting back with a great sense of relieved certainty. Hotel Transylvania is a fun, spontaneously enjoyable effort that is presented with wit and stylistic touches by the highly acclaimed director, Genndy Tartakovsky (whose credentials include the cherished Dexter's Laboratory and Star Wars: Clone Wars), and a storyline that is well-told and, thankfully, refuses to exploit its father-daughter relationship.
This is the second animated film I have seen that was released in the year 2012 and also centers on the complex relationships had by parents and their daughters. The last effort I saw was Pixar's Brave, an unfairly bashed spectacle that beautifully articulated a confident heroine that knew what she wanted to become, refraining from an obligatory subplot about a character lacking in direction, but was met with conflicts from her domineering mother. Hotel Transylvania lacks the moral-heaviness and amplifies the situations and events in a more rambunctious way, yet still not forgetting the elephant in the room. It balances both of these things nicely, and will consistently find ways to delight the little ones and please the older ones.
The plot: We are presented with Dracula (voiced by Adam Sandler), the owner and creator of Hotel Transylvania, an enormous castle that has the ability to house hundreds of monsters and keep them safe from the activity of dreaded humans. Dracula is a widow, who is taking precious care of his daughter, Mavis (Selena Gomez), who has just turned 118 years old and is young and ready to explore the world. Dracula, as one can expect, is heavy into the suturing aspect of parenting, putting fear and impossibly unrealistic notions of how unsafe and dreadfully scary the human-driven world is, and stages a setup for her to see this when she leaves the castle for the first time.
He believes that after showing her "the horrors" of the world, Mavis is at Hotel Transylvania for good. That is until Dracula decides to throw a party, inviting fellow monsters like Frankenstein (Kevin James), Murray the Mummy (Cee Lo Green), Wayne and Wanda Werewolf (Steve Buscemi and Molly Shannon), and Griffin the Invisible Man (David Spade), just when a naive young human named Jonathan (Andy Samberg) wanders onto the hotel's territory. Dracula makes every attempt possible to hide Jonathan from the monsters and vice-versa, to show that Hotel Transylvania is the human-free paradise it has been and always will be, but Jonathan soon finds himself romantically involved with Mavis, much to Dracula's dismay.
There are two things that became more apparent to American audiences in 2012 when watching animated films, and those were the revival of nostalgic little things and relationships between parents and their children. Wreck-It Ralph introduced the younger generation to the beautiful machines that were arcades, inventing several new worlds and detailing them all exquisitely, while Hotel Transylvania attempts to further the "kiddie horror movie" genre (which has been one of the most consistent genres in animation this year) by introducing them to the classic Universal monsters. It's nothing but apparent that the cast, which is mainly comprised of Adam Sandler's Happy Madison company, has a love and respect for the iconic horror figures that shaped the genre, and in ninety-two minutes they put a clever PG-rated spin that will delight many children and please genre-purists.
Pixar's Brave should be one of the films that serves as a poster-child for parental-child disconnect, where an identity crisis wasn't apparent on the main character and neither was a sense of directionless. The main theme there was compromise between a girl's mother and the girl herself, so that she could pursue the life of freedom she always wanted without contention with her mother. Hotel Transylvania shows a father's protection that goes way past that idea to channel sheltered and anti-social behavior. His daughter just wants to see the world for herself and not be gridlocked to her father's nosy, impulsively petulant nature. What needs to result is something of a compromise, and perhaps parents will see their relationships with their own children in this film and, hopefully, make some fitting adjustments.
Hotel Transylvania is beautifully animated (coming from Sony Pictures Animation, a company that still may have a long way to go before its name hits the majority of households), and occupies a fluency and style that Tartakovsky has made a name for over the years. The only thing I can see being bothersome for audiences, including myself, is the somewhat frantic pacing, which hits near-breakneck speeds in the first forty minutes, but comes to a pleasantly controlled nature for the remaining fifty. There seems to be so much detail, homage, and style in the picture that maintaining a frantic pace throughout the entire course of its runtime would've been lethal to its likability.
Voiced by: Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, Selena Gomez, Kevin James, Fran Drescher, Steve Buscemi, Molly Shannon, David Spade, and Cee Lo Green. Directed by: Genndy Tartakovsky.