The film is once again directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, who directed the previous two and, for the first time in the series, has taken a screenwriting credit with Michael McCullers. He is a brilliant animation director and one of my favorites, best known for creating Dexter's Laboratory and Samurai Jack (he recently finished season 5 which I thought was masterful). I love his timing and editing; I've always appreciated his work. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation is filled with visual inventiveness, creative character designs, good jokes, funny sequences and tons of adult humor. Just like the previous two, there's a lot of jokes that kids are not going to understand; this film has even more adult humor than the last, which I appreciated.
As far as storytelling goes, it's going to be very obvious from the beginning. This movie was a bit too much for me as in it was too much where it needed less and it wasn’t enough where it needed more. There's really no surprises. In fact, the plot is so basic I feel the main plot of this movie is five pages of script. It is different than the other two because it takes place on a cruise ship, so you have a new environment with new things that you can do. So, it does feel like its own thing compared to the others. This movie attempted to be fun and it was, but to the point of being exhausting. The jokes in this movie get old pretty fast; it just felt repetitive. One of the advantages of these movies is that if a joke doesn't work, they quickly move on to the next one. Some of the jokes were not hitting and I didn’t feel like it was fluid with the plot. I think a big part of that is the jokes didn't seem as character-driven. They have so many characters now. Johnny is pointless throughout the film, until the end. You forget he's there and he was a major part of the first two movies. Some of the other characters almost kind of blend together. Frank, The Mummy and The Invisible Man almost seem like one character now. They're all there to make some jokes work or not work. It’s more fast-paced because it does feel like a series of jokes and that could be a negative because you wonder where's the story going. There isn't that much under the surface and that's fine. I don't think that every animated film has to be mind-blowingly deep; some are just meant to teach kids a lesson, while also entertaining them.
As someone who loves animation, this film feels different than your average animation nowadays like Pixar. Incredibles 2 feels like a film, an experience. The Hotel Transylvania movies feel like cartoons and I mean that as a positive; this could be because of Tartakovsky's background with Cartoon Network. You can enjoy the characters and have fun laughing at their situations, but in particular it's the character design and visual creativeness with every monster. There's an early sequence on an airplane run by a bunch of gremlins, Gremlin Airlines. There's a lot of great moments like that which has a hidden message in there because, just like the other two, the underlying moral of the film is that humans and monsters can co-exist; you're allowed to look at someone else who might be different from you and appreciate them for who they are. That's something kids are going to take away from and hopefully apply to their own life.
What I loved about the first two films is although the animation is fun and it did have a lot of energy to it, every character had a distinct kind of movement. In the first movie, if you compare how some of the characters move: Dracula is very proper, upright and usually the upper half of his body is not doing much, but his lower half is doing something; Mavis is feminine, sleek and smooth; Frank is very big, so he'll move very grand and huge; and The Mummy is more round, so he'll move with more curves. I think these movies have this way where characters will suddenly move very quickly. In the first two films, it was balanced just enough. In this film, every character moves like that all the time and they all move the same. You’re thinking not everyone needs to be doing something. Calm down, stop, take a breath! It's very distracting when you just want to hear a joke and focus on what they're saying.
They introduce Erika, a new character who is the descendant of Van Helsing, which is a funny idea, and even she moves like everyone else. I think one of the things that really drew me to the other films is that even though they're not phenomenally character-driven, that's still the focus. I think that's surprisingly what made a lot of those jokes work in the first two films. Even though not all of them work, it's still what gave it its charm and I think that's what's missing here. A lot of the charm is gone and it's not replaced with comedy funny enough to fill that void.
There are still a few emotional moments where it can slow down. I like this idea that Dracula is feeling lonely and looking for someone else to be with. You see him try to go on a date and be nice, but the person he's trying to date is trying to kill him; this is a great idea. I like those moments, but there's not many and a lot of it is replaced with generic slapstick that sometimes works. Sometimes they'll throw in a little surreal humor. When Dennis and Winnie (Mavis and Johnny's son and his werewolf friend who I feel are very underutilized) are trying to sneak in his gigantic pet dog, they have him in a big coat and hat. They say, "This is Bob. Say 'Hi Bob.'" The dog suddenly goes "Hi Bob" and walks in. You have no idea how that's possible. Jokes like that are great and there are a couple, but it's very half and half. When they don't work, it's not awful; you're just really wishing it worked because it worked so well in the other two films.
The thing I actually liked the most above the animation is the basic message of monsters may look different from us, but it doesn’t mean they’re not the same. This movie makes an attempt to go a little deeper. I’m not saying they go full ending or anything, but this movie delved into an angle of how it exists. I thought that was really gutsy and impressive where most movies just stop at the fact of the matter addressing that prejudices exist. Anyway, I’m not saying there’s the way, this one thing that happens that causes prejudice, but I liked how it showed how they have a tendency to get passed down.
The climax, which is suppose to be the big moment in the movie, has this musical setup where they have to use songs against each other. Dracula and Johnny need a positive song and they're playing all sorts of different songs. They say we really need something happy, an incredible beat to defeat the evil negativity. What's so funny is that there's so many other songs you can choose because they built it up so much that this one song could probably get a laugh. The song they choose is baffling; I'm amazed they went with this because not only is it old, it's not even old in a retro way. I guess it was kind of trying to replicate Jim Carrey’s “Cuban Pete” sequence from The Mask. Another good example is when Catherine O’Hara and the other guests sing Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” in Beetlejuice. It's already a timeless song that it gets a laugh; it's just so bizarre and out of nowhere, it rides the strangeness of it. Here, it's not weird, relevant or funny enough; it's the most awkward song you can choose. However, while critics will likely jump, at least this movie goes for it; it really puts everything out there and blows up with this crazy sequence.
I had a weird reaction towards the big finale. At first, I was scratching my head, thinking "Are they really doing this? They are. I guess they're going for it.” In the end, I was cringing, thinking “Who made that choice?,” but had this feeling inside that it kind of won me over. I heard one half of the audience I saw it with, a lot of children, laughing and having a good time. The other half wasn’t feeling it or getting into it. So, was the climax good or bad? I’ll let you be the judge. I think that’s the divide between critics who go to this film and want to express whether or not they were entertained by it, but in the long run it is really made for families.
I'm still glad I saw this and I don't regret seeing it because I like showing support for these movies, especially when other critics don't for whatever reason. There's still a few jokes that work; one that only adults can appreciate is Wayne and Wanda (the Wolf Man and his wife), whose children are constantly on them. They never get any free time. When they find a daycare on the ship, Wayne is like "You'll take our kids, on purpose?" A lot of parents in the audience laughed at that and the kids were silent, but that's a joke entirely for the parents. So, the werewolves drop off the kids and you see what they do in their spare time; they're just so not used to not having kids and they've never had that before. Stuff like that is great and that comes from their character; I think that's where that works. Any of the jokes that come directly from the characters I think are usually pretty solid; any jokes around the monster stuff is okay, but a lot of generic slapstick didn't hit.
If you like the first two films and are curious enough that you know it's not going to be that hot, but you like its world and characters, I still say go check it out. It's not super bad or offensive and there's nothing ethically bad in it. You can take your kids to see it. There’s a lot of goofy stuff, too much slapstick honestly; it doesn't really balance out. Hotel Transylvania 3 isn't going to go down as an animation classic nor will the first two, but this series is a fun enough cartoon that adults can enjoy as well as kids. Overall, you'll get enough laughs out of this.
There is something that animations do commonly: when someone gets beaten up, their wounds disappear seconds later because it's a cartoon. There's a scene where Dracula gets a hundred arrows in his body, an axe in his head and snakes biting his arm. I kept waiting for them to disappear, but they remain on him for the entirety of the rest of the scene and it got so hilarious that they weren't going away. Tartakovsky is playing with animation tropes and that's something that he does so differently than your average animation director. I want to see more from him. After completing Hotel Transylvania 2, he was working on two different projects: an original concept called “Can You Imagine?” and a Popeye film. Now, he’s working on two newer projects: Fixed, an R-rated comedy, and Black Knight, an epic action-adventure film. I'm hoping to see these get green-lit.
