Hotel Transylvania 3 Is the Best Monster Vacation Yet Thanks to Its Zany Comedy

The first two Hotel Transylvania movies have come off as contradictory features, a tug-of-war between the artistic ambitions of director Genndy Tartakovsky, an animation legend most well-known for his work on The Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Laboratory and Samurai Jack, and the obligations of conventional 21st-century animated family movie filmmaking. In both of these films, one can clearly see Tatakovsky trying to push computer-animation in a more zany direction akin to the kind of wacky animation seen in the Flash hand-drawn animation he used on his earlier projects. While their computer-animation had flashes of being something special, their generic celebrity voice-over casts, contemporary music needle drops and rote gags felt like something you could find in any number of other animated films.


With Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation, though, it feels like the balance has shifted over more to Tartakovsky's side as the proceedings go for more fantastical storytelling and a heavier emphasis on stylized visual gags. Those elements play out in a plot concerning lonely Dracula (Adam Sandler) being taken on a surprise cruise ship vacation by his daughter, Mavis (Selena Gomez). Steering this ship is captain Erica (Kathryn Hahn), a human that Dracula finds himself immediately smitten for. Unbeknownst to him, Erica is a member of the Van Helsing family that has sworn to kill off all monsters. A trip to Atlantis, date nights and other shenanigans ensue as Dracula and Erica begin to develop a romantic bond.

Tartakovsky and Michael McCullers' screenplay is certainly on the episodic side with digressions into bits of stand-alone comedy taking precedent over a cohesive script. Sometimes the film even begins to resemble one of those 1980s Looney Tunes compilation movies like The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie where somebody just compiled a bunch of classic short films together to make one motion picture. Luckily, the episodic structure can be partially forgiven since a good chunk of the gags it gets sidetracked with are actually on the funny side. This is thanks to the animation of this newest Hotel Transylvania movie handily being the best realization of Tartakovsky's dream of translating the comedic flexibility of hand-drawn animation into computer-animation.

In Hotel Transylvania 3, individual characters, particularly Dracula, don't exactly have one set body shape or facial expression, rather, they're comedic oobleck's that can stretch, shrink and contort to fit whatever sort of visual comedy Tartakovsky and McCullers come up with. Much like they did in certain spots of last years Smallfoot, the animators at Sony Pictures Imageworks really come through in executing kooky visual comedy. Heck, even the character designs of newbie characters make good use of more outlandish tendencies, especially in the design of Erica's great-grandfather whose now just two hands and a head protruding out of an old-timey mechanical device. He alone is a more memorable looking creation than anything in the last two Hotel Transylvania movies.

There's plenty of outlandish imagery in here that had me chuckling (the sight of a giant dog disguising itself in a trenchcoat is a classic gag is especially amusing). This heavier reliance on eccentric comedy has the added benefit of influencing the overall plot to also more into entertainingly madcap terrain. A duel with a gigantic Kracken and a tango through underwater booby traps are far more interesting sights to watch than the humdrum "Kids these days!" antics from the second Hotel Transylvania movie. Of course, this being a Hotel Transylvania movie, the tug-of-war between classic cartoony fun and conventional traits of a 2018 animated movie still emerge and drag Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation down like an anchor.

While new cast member Kathryn Hahn is a perfect fit for this film's style of wacky humor, the returning cast members still feel flat and frequently don't fit their characters at all. Adam Sandler, for one, still can't vanish into his Dracula character, he still always sounds like Sandler in a recording booth while Andy Samberg still sounds so lifeless as supporting character Johnny. Why these Hotel Transylvania movies are the only films where Samberg seems to sleepwalk through, I'll never know. The incorporation of predictable bathroom humor gags, contemporary music needle drops and the perfunctory execution of crucial emotional moments similarly reek of trying to adhere to a mold of what computer-animated family movies should be while the most anarchic absurdist visual gags of Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation see this series finally fulfilling its potential to be something delightfully bonkers.