Hotel Transylvania is the debut feature of Cartoon Network legend Genndy Tartakovsky. It is bursting at the seams with ideas. However, these ideas seem to mostly be coming from the SNL brain trust that this film rests its foundation upon. You’ll find few similarities between this and Tartakovsky’s television work.

The premise of the film is to recycle the monster squad comedies of yesteryear into a fresh package for the new generation. There’s a lot of monster gags derived from transplanting human behavior into monster life in the same way that Osmosis Jones did with intra-human inhabitants, and plenty of snappy camera whips to sell them. There’s also what many will see as an excess of meta-comedy, aimed both at the monster genre in general (“I don’t say ‘blah, blah, blah.’”) and Hotel Transylvania itself (“Did they know we were coming?”). Some of it is quite clever, but it feels relatively safe and does little to differentiate it from the comedy of irreverence found in animated films of this time period.

Hotel Transylvania is the debut feature of Cartoon Network legend Genndy Tartakovsky. It is bursting at the seams with ideas. However, these ideas seem to mostly be coming from the SNL brain trust that this film rests its foundation upon. You’ll find few similarities between this and Tartakovsky’s television work.

The premise of the film is to recycle the monster squad comedies of yesteryear into a fresh package for the new generation. There’s a lot of monster gags derived from transplanting human behavior into monster life in the same way that Osmosis Jones did with intra-human inhabitants, and plenty of snappy camera whips to sell them. There’s also what many will see as an excess of meta-comedy, aimed both at the monster genre in general (“I don’t say ‘blah, blah, blah.’”) and Hotel Transylvania itself (“Did they know we were coming?”). Some of it is quite clever, but it feels relatively safe and does little to differentiate it from the comedy of irreverence found in animated films of this time period.

Hotel Transylvania is the debut feature of Cartoon Network legend Genndy Tartakovsky. It is bursting at the seams with ideas. However, these ideas seem to mostly be coming from the SNL brain trust that this film rests its foundation upon. You’ll find few similarities between this and Tartakovsky’s television work.

The premise of the film is to recycle the monster squad comedies of yesteryear into a fresh package for the new generation. There’s a lot of monster gags derived from transplanting human behavior into monster life in the same way that Osmosis Jones did with intra-human inhabitants, and plenty of snappy camera whips to sell them. There’s also what many will see as an excess of meta-comedy, aimed both at the monster genre in general (“I don’t say ‘blah, blah, blah.’”) and Hotel Transylvania itself (“Did they know we were coming?”). Some of it is quite clever, but it feels relatively safe and does little to differentiate it from the comedy of irreverence found in animated films of this time period.

When I was a teenager, I arrived home from a music festival with a paper copy of The Onion newspaper. I left it on the kitchen counter and went off to sleep the sleep of the dead. I came down the next morning to find my dad reading the page one story: DYLAN GOES ELECTRONICA. It had a photo of Dylan standing over a DJ kit like Tiesto. He read the whole thing as if he were reading an obituary. He sighed. He let me know it was a shame. He didn’t really even have the heart to discuss it much. I never told him. He’s still disappointed in Dylan. I’m a bad son.

Scorsese opens his 2005 documentary about Dylan with some insight into the intention of the song “Like a Rolling Stone”: