Genndy Tartakovsky animates his monsters with more snap than any computer cartoon of the period, and for twenty minutes at a time it is a pleasure. Then the story turns up, and it is the overprotective-father film you have seen before, done louder.
Genndy Tartakovsky made Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack for television, and his first feature is built on a single joke: the undead want what the rest of us want, a weekend away and for the children not to grow up. Count Dracula (Adam Sandler) runs a hotel for monsters in a Transylvanian forest where no human has ever set foot. His daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) is turning 118 and wants to see the world. The world arrives as Jonathan (Andy Samberg), a backpacker who follows some torch-bearing ghouls through the woods and strolls into the lobby, and Peter Baynham and Robert Smigel’s script spends the rest of its 91 minutes on Dracula trying to keep the two apart.
The reason to see it is the way it moves. Tartakovsky animates as if the computer were a pencil, with the squash and stretch of a 1940s short. Dracula’s cape snaps into a bat before the rest of him catches up; Wayne the werewolf (Steve Buscemi) sinks a little further into the carpet with each of the several dozen pups that climb him. The best sequence sends Dracula and Jonathan on a chase through the corridors on flying banquet tables, and Catherine Apple cuts it so fast that the geography never settles and never needs to. We laughed out loud more than we expected to, in a cinema full of six-year-olds, and most of it was at faces: a shrunken head on a door handle (Luenell) complaining about the noise, a suit of armour (Brian George) snapping to attention, Frankenstein (Kevin James) losing a hand and carrying on.
Marcelo Vignali’s hotel is a real place. It has a great hall under ribbed stone vaults, zombie bellhops in pillbox caps who drop every bag, witches on broomsticks doing the housekeeping and a swimming pool with something large under the surface. The camera is seldom still long enough to let us look at any of it.
Sandler does a thick, old-Hollywood Transylvanian accent and is better here than in most of his live-action comedies of the period, because the animators do the mugging for him. Gomez’s Mavis is sweet and barely written, a girl with one wish and no other traits. Samberg is the engine. His Jonathan talks like a skateboard video and is the only person in the film who does not know he is in a cartoon. The supporting monsters are comedians given a note each: Fran Drescher’s Eunice nags, David Spade’s invisible Griffin is a pair of spectacles with opinions, CeeLo Green’s Murray is the party mummy. Jon Lovitz’s Quasimodo, the hotel chef, has the best voice in the building and the least to do with it.
The story is the problem. The script knows one trick, in which Dracula tells a lie, the lie wobbles and Dracula tells a bigger one, and it runs that trick for an hour. The father-and-daughter scenes are written to a formula the film seems embarrassed by, so it hurries through them and then overscores them: Mark Mothersbaugh’s music, nimble in the gags, turns to strings and piano whenever a feeling is due, and by the third time we had stopped believing it. The film’s word for love at first sight is “zing”, repeated often enough to wear through. It did not move us. By the last third, when the farce turns into a lesson, we were restless, and the songs that arrive late on, which we will not place, are the auto-tuned pop that dates a family film faster than anything else in it.
Against Tartakovsky’s television work, which was built on silence and timing, this is loud and nervous. Against the Pixar and Aardman films it will be competing with on a half-term afternoon, it is short on anyone to care about. The tagline promises a place where monsters go to get away from it all, and nobody in the film, us included, is allowed to get away from anything for more than a minute.
Most critics found it roughly as we did, a lively mess, and the reviews split between those who forgave it and those who did not. Children between six and ten will get ninety minutes of good noise, and the U certificate is fair, the frights being all faces and no teeth. Adults will get a dozen proper laughs, a handsome hotel and a wish that someone had told the gag writers to breathe.
