Hotel Transylwania

Oof! After all those “important” Oscar dramas, it’s so nice to put on a happy and undemanding animated flick with monsters. Thumbs up and I’m not ashamed to say it. During the first ten minutes I was fortunately able to overcome the feeling of “this looks awful” (in today’s competition in animated films, Hotel Transylvania is not among the top aesthetically) and switch into a relax mode. A very nice and refreshing break. The skeleton of a story is unoriginal, but I don’t watch animation looking for screenwriting innovation. The important thing is that it’s brisk and doesn’t last three hours. (12.01.2013)

Given the name of the director, the creative talent involved (the storyboards were done by the brilliant Rebeca Sugar) and the production company, Hotel Transylvania is a major disappointment. It’s just a run-of-the-mill animated movie for kids made according to the most primitive template, where personality is lacking and mediocrity is invoked in the interest of playing it safe. Making a mish-mash of pop culture allusions and showing the supposedly civilian faces of iconic fictional characters might have still been captivating eleven years ago in Shrek (though this is a technique known from mainstream family movies dating as far back as the 1980s), but not so much today, when cultural recycling is one of the hackneyed and, thanks to the broad availability of information, actually the simplest and most careless principles of pop culture. At one time – granted, it was a few year ago already – Sony Pictures Animation was considered to be the new hope in the field of animated movies for the whole family, as it gave space to imaginative creative and technical visions. Now, however, it’s quite tempting to make the generalisation that it’s just milking franchises that have caught on and trying to come up with new ones, but they take the form of cash cows that have no significant creative ambition and just throw all sorts of attractions at viewers willy-nilly with the hope that something sticks. In the context of the studio’s current output, Hotel Transylvania is a solid but unremarkable standard movie whose strength lies in its precisely conceived images, but it remains the least distinctive entry in Tartakovsky’s filmography. (09.08.2014)

A purely average film. The filmmakers obviously intended a cannonade of jokes, but not all of their attempts at humor succeeded, and they did not avoid perhaps the greatest vice of contemporary (especially American) comedy - the painfully convoluted combination of humor with a moralizing message. Yes, yes, I really did laugh here and there, but it was often just so, um, bloodless.___P.S. In the Czech dubbing, the (ware)wolf Wayne is called Helmut and has a German accent. Anyone have any idea why? (19.04.2015)

A hilariously funny fairy tale about peaceful bloodsuckers, where moralizing (and more) is turned upside down, the storytelling pace rushes literally like lightning, and – most importantly – there's a great joke every few seconds and a line or expression every few minutes that brings me reliably to my knees. Though I can't explain how this creative composition came together, I won't hide that I had a broad grin on my face for hours after the closing credits. Maybe thanks to Mavis, whom I fell in love with during the first five minutes. (05.08.2013)

I've already said it many times, but I'll repeat it: there can never be enough of these cool, fresh and fun animated films, and I hope the day never comes when I stop liking them. Hotel Transylvania is really top-notch not only in terms of the comfort prepared for vampires, werewolves, mummies, and Steins from all over the world, but above all because it manages to grab your heart as a cute movie full of even cuter characters, whose life attitudes made the whole packed theatre (about 13 people) laugh out loud. I certainly don't regret the money I spent at the cinema, on the contrary, I am very happy that the themes for a quality animated film have expanded a bit again and the creators have shown that we certainly have nothing to fear in this direction in the coming years. 80% (05.10.2012)