Twisting Horror classics into childhood fun!

Rating: 9/10 (5 May 2014)

So what would happen if Dracula had a daughter and the only thing he wanted for her was to keep her safe locked up in a tower? That's very similar to the plot of Hotel Transylvania. Seriously, if you took Rapunzel, made her vampire, and sent her off to a remote place that no one would go to, you would have this particular story. The basics to the over lining story is so cliché that you would think it would get boring watching, and yet, it's not boring at all. With all the twists that they did in having the monsters being the ones in distress instead of a human makes for a lot of speculation on how family life for a monster would be. They have Werewolves with a whole pack of little ankle biters (yes, they really would bite them), Frankenstein who travels by mail instead of using a plane, and even a very lively mummy. It makes the place look like it's never dull.
We have the rather old school father trying to protect his child after her mother has passed away. It's a simple story and surprisingly, instead of following the daughter like I thought it was going to do, it followed her father learning how to have fun and stop being so stiff. When I see a story about a father protecting his daughter, one thing comes to mind. It's the thought that no matter what, the father is going to get in the way of the romance, try to pull his daughter away from whomever it is that may take her away and the daughter fighting and sneaking out. Sometimes that would even go as far as her running from her father just to be with someone. It really caught me off guard when it turned into a story about Dracula instead of his daughter. On the other hand, the guy of this story was a little bit to hippie-ish for my taste. When he first comes in talking like a surfer, I was just about to switch the show off and say 'Nope! Done!' because I thought he would be like that the whole time. Luckily, he calmed down a bit in how he talked as the show went on but his first impression was one I could not stand.
You can't really say that there was an antagonist or a real enemy that the characters had to fight, making it slightly different then any of the other shows I've seen. When you think a character is going to be the antagonist, they turn around to make it similar to a hero. The only one that comes close to being an antagonist would probably be the chef Quasimodo and his rat Esmeralda.
The artwork is rather good though with a lot of squash and stretching. It's not what kills the show though as even though no one would ever bend the way they bend, it adds to the comedic affect of how the show is. For a show about monsters, there really isn't any horror in it at all. In fact, even when they try to be horror-istic (made up word alert!), it's for comedic affect. The colors are bright surprisingly for a show about monsters and the designs really stand out. Some of the monsters I had to stop and ask 'what are they' but most of them were based on what we automatically think of when someone says Dracula, Mummy, or Frankenstein. Others had nice twists like making the invisible man have a red afro (I do not know this for sure. It is what is hinted). The credits were fun because they used rather old cartoon graphics that feel like I'm watching a silent cartoon film listening to an awesome song 'I'm a Monster'. Then to add to it, they had some wonderful water color concept art that I think was for what happen afterwords. It's a bit dark and grimy looking and yet has almost a 'Paris style' quality. What I mean when I say that is that the watercolors and how some of the storks of designs remind me of Toulouse Lautrec and some other famous painters from France.
The voices fit the characters really well from what I would imagine, to a point I don't exactly know what to say. It's just what makes the show even better and is like icing on the cake. I wish we had a few more accents is all I want. The Mummy didn't have enough of the Egyptian sound to him, the gremlins sounded like everyday people and so on. Maybe it's me being 'racist' in that aspect but I think it would have made the show a little more fun. The only one I found annoying was Frankenstein's wife who sounded like she was a hairdresser in New Jersey, at least the stereotypical one played in most movies. That kind of annoys me a little bit but she was not on long enough to make it to bad.