Film Review | Hotel Transylvania

'Hotel Transylvania' is clean, and often funny, family fare, with a messagemonsters are cool

Count Dracula, Drac to friends, has set up his abode deep inside a forest that is supposedly accessible only to monsters of various shapes, sizes and textures. Drac calls his friends over for the 118th birthday of his daughter Mavis. She wants to travel beyond the high walls of their castle and experience the human world, but her father, who hates humans even though he stopped sucking their blood centuries ago, won’t hear of it. Somehow, backpacker slacker Johnny gets into the castle—it seems like the easiest thing, really—and Mavis falls in love. In short, your average family drama, only told through animation.

Energetically directed by Genndy Tartakovsky and released in 2D and 3D versions, Hotel Transylvania is voiced by several big names (Adam Sandler is Dracula, Selena Gomez is Mavis, Parks and Recreation actor Andy Samberg is her paramour Johnny, Steve Buscemi is a werewolf and Kevin James is Frankenstein). The 90-minute screenplay is littered with memorable visual gags, some of which whiz by just as you have registered them. There are the zombie construction workers conforming to type and checking out a female zombie dragging herself along, a talkative shrunken head door hanger, a shrieking skull-shaped telephone, two honeymooning bugs who loudly protest interruptus, skeletal waiters and housekeeping witches, and a battle between Drac and his future son-in-law waged on the tops of flying tables.

Never mind. Hotel Transylvania is clean, and often funny, family fare, with a message—monsters are cool, yo, and humans aren’t too bad either—buried amid the frenzy. The slack-jawed Johnny sums up the movie’s mood perfectly when he declares, “Creepy is cool!" The 3D is forgettable, the monster characters, fortunately, aren’t.

Hotel Transylvania released in theatres on Friday.