A tangled mess of characters in parent-knows-best animation.

Rating: 4/10 (27 September 2012)

HERE'S another animation about parents doing the thinking for their children. In Brave, a mum and and her teen daughter argue about whom the latter will marry.
In Hotel Transylvania, Dracula dad (voiced by Adam Sandler) does his best to keep his teen daughter, Mavis (Selena Gomez), from stepping out into the real world or, horrors, falling in love with a human.
The main thing that you'll remember after watching this high-quality production but low-quality joke fest is the chaos that permeates it.
Director Genndy Tartakovsky hits you with everything he can, including weird and cuddly characters, such as werewolf Wayne (Steve Buscemi in that whiny voice of his), Invisible Man (David Spade), mummy Murray (CeeLo Green) and Frank the Frankenstein (Kevin James). There are also characters voiced by Molly Shannon, Fren Drescher and Jon Lovitz.
There's so much going on that viewers will have a hard time focusing on anyone or anything. But, not to worry, you get your usual dose of fart jokes, as per required in a Sandler movie.
Sandler's Dracula is so over the top with his unusual European accent that you wished he'd stuck to English.
Dracula plans his daughter's 118th birthday party to welcome her into adulthood and invites monsters of all kinds to the party at his hidden castle. He, surprisingly, allows her to visit a nearby village, but what she doesn't know is that he built it and his underlings disguised themselves to look like humans out to torch her.
His antipathy towards humans isn't explained initially, but it's later revealed that humans burnt down a castle, which killed his wife but spared their daughter.
A bushy haired and gangling backpacking teen, Jonathan (Andy Samberg), chances upon the hotel and makes himself a menace there, but he and Mavis hit it off immediately, forcing the father to execute anti- falling-in-love-with-human measures.
Mavis embraces Jonathan's nomadic lifestyle, and is touched by his visit to the Taj Mahal, built by Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his third wife.
While funny events are rare in Hotel Transylvania, there are some well- crafted scenes that you wished the movie had more of, for example, the table-raising chase scene between Dracula and Jonathan, and a couple of live band performances.
The movie's conclusion is that humans and monsters can get over their fear of each other and learn to get along well.
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