Hotel Transylvania 2 3D - THE GUARDIAN review

There’s irony in the fact that animation, a medium where literally anything is possible, is so frequently stale and predictable. Animation in mainstream Hollywood features, that is. Recent financial successes such as Minions, Home and Big Hero 6 are frequently cute, but they set up their aesthetic in the first scene and usually stay enslaved to it. Even Pixar’s Inside Out, certainly a notch above the competition, is more about colour and design than movement and unpredictability.

Hotel Transylvania (2012) showed what can happen when a fairly typical “what if?” script got in the hands of an animation director with a more inspired vision, in this case Genndy Tartakovsky. No better or worse an animation script than Megamind, Penguins of Madagascar or Rio, Hotel Transylvania was the first cartoon movie to hit theatres in ages that captured the antic, frantic sugar rush of Woody Woodpecker, Tom & Jerry or Bugs Bunny.

More than that, the simple story of a crusty father (Adam Sandler voicing Dracula) running a resort with his classic monster pals (a mummy, Frankenstein’s monster, a wolfman, etc) took the macabre but not really scary environment, stretched it out like a rubber band and snapped it off the walls. It was computer generated, but owed more to the exaggerated, simple drawings of Gerald McBoing-Boing than the now dated look of, say, A Bug’s Life. (In its not-quite use of the Universal Monsters, it was also a masterclass for intrepid entertainment lawyers.)

Hotel Transylvania’s refreshing visual aspect could run from blobby to zippy in the same chase sequence. Add in the “spooktacular” setting, with round dinner tables transforming into cute, flying ghosts, and there was more than enough for it to rise above its standard plotting and not infrequent flatulence jokes. Unfortunately, what squeaked across the finish line last time falls short here. We’re left with flat, annoying characters and a rote storyline that’s too high of a hurdle even for Tartakovsky’s visual dynamism.

The bulk of the picture is mired in typical sitcom-dad antics. With Dracula’s daughter Mavis (voiced by Selena Gomez) now a young mother with her dummkopf human husband Johnny (Andy Samberg), she’s worried about raising her child in Transylvania. Dracula and his band of buddies (voiced by Steve Buscemi, Kevin James, David Spade and others) conspire in a series of elaborate tricks to convince her not to move to California. It ends in a messy chase and Mel Brooks doing his 2000-year-old-man voice as Dracula’s father.

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There are a few amusing gags about “mixed marriages” in Hotel Transylvania 2, but the script by Sandler and Robert Smigel (the genius behind Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog) is surprisingly tame, with lots of selfie jokes that won’t be funny in a few years. Actually, they aren’t funny now. Every beat is predictable and even the most dazzled kids might wonder why father and daughter won’t just talk about their obvious feelings. Compared to the nuanced story of Inside Out, it’s absolutely infuriating.

By the end of this 89-minute film, I was absolutely on the edge of my seat. Not due to suspense, but due to my utter disdain for the infantile plotting.
Tartakovsky, whose earlier work includes the shows Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars (not the visually inferior Star Wars: TheClone Wars) and the gorgeous, practically Bakshi-esque 10-minute prologue to the not-so-hot Paul Bettany film Priest, is currently developing an original property called Can You Imagine? for the same studio that’s releasing Hotel Transylvania 2. If you are catching a whiff of one for them, one for me mixed in with this sequel’s wolfsbane, you aren’t alone.

thanks to THEGUARDIAN

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/sep/24/hotel-transylvania-2-review-flat-annoying-and-lacking-in-bite