Myth Breaker

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA

DIRECTOR: Genndy Tartakovsky

CAST: Adam Sandler, Selena Gomez, Andy Samberg,

Kevin James

Rating: **1/2

Having lost his wife when his daughter was a baby in the 19th century, Count Dracula of Transylvania has built himself a castle which a human would find impossible to enter. Given the way they are chased and executed by mankind, the monsters are convinced it is they who are the victims and Dracula's plans for a hotel where they can all be who they are without slinking in the shadows is an appealing thought.

Trouble only starts brewing around 118 years later. These are equivalent to 18 years in human life and so Dracula's daughter Mavis now considers herself an adult who should be allowed to see the world and take her own decisions. Dracula would have none of that and so engineers some humans to convince her that should she leave the hotel, she would end up being either burnt on the stake, killed with a pitchfork or fed to death with garlic.

However, Dracula hasn't accounted for one happy-go-lucky, fearless teenager Jonathan finding his way to the castle. Non-plussed initially, he eventually takes all the vampires, invisible men, mummies, zombies, Frankensteins, hydra-headed creatures and werewolves coming his way, as normal. It's not long before he is upsetting both Dracula's calculations as well as Mavis's presumptions, even though for the longest time Dracula manages to convince everybody that Jonathan isn't really human.

Hotel Transylvania has an interesting story to work with, and a suitably irreverent Sandler to play him. Samberg and Gomez too do their parts well, with the vivid animation running wild with the monster world.

However the weakness of this Sony animation is its repetitiveness, its simplistic resolution, its far-too-many characters and its almost-desperate bid to make the story about more than it really is.

... contd.

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