Review: Hotel Transylvania “Enter the Nose Picker/Hide & Shriek”

Let’s go digging for copper!

Enter the Nose Picker/Hide & Shriek

Disney Channel/XD has a long history of premiering TV adaptations of popular movie franchises and more often than not they have been all awful. Disney XD has been shilling out Marvel cartoons to the point of desperation and even Lion King spin-offs aren’t immune to being just utter crap.

Enter, Hotel Transylvania. A new animated series inspired by the popular film franchise NOT produced by Disney that is actually not half-bad. The series kicks off by kind of setting the stage for you and telling you how this show fits in with the movies. In this case, we spend time with Mavis as a kid who wants to have fun with her pals while her aunt and father watch over the living quarters for their guests. Wendy Blob, Hank N Stein, and Pedro join the fray as Mavis’ friends as the latter deals with trying to keep the quarters clean for hotel inspections and demonic play things terrorizing her.

There are some concepts derived from the show that I really quite enjoy that aren’t quite the norm. For starters, despite the episode title, this show is NOT split up into two episodes like other Disney shows in that you get 11 minutes, reset, and then get another 11 minutes. Instead, the series kind of bleeds the first episode into the second with no B-plots, just “let’s do the A plot first, complete, now let’s get into the next A plot”. It’s a very interesting model and one that I think works very well. Moreover, the episodes don’t even run in the same order as the episode titles listed which makes for a subtle surprise.

The voice acting is pretty damn good, we don’t Sadie Sandler voicing this era of Mavis despite the fact that she did in the movies, nor does Adam reprise his role as Dracula, but the replacements don’t try and perpetuate poor imitations of their big-screened counterparts, instead, delivering well-acted voices that should help the series stand on its own two legs. I don’t think the dialogue is that strong, but the show IS gag-heavy which is an art that is lost on most modern animated television.  By the way, the show makes a fantastic transition from 3D CG to 2D, with spooky backdrops oozing with playful suspense amid a setting that should make for a bunch of good ideas.

As it stands, I’m looking forward to these ideas fleshing out. The characters are strong and it looks great, overall, Hotel Transylvania is a fresh deviation from the normal Disney mass-produced junk.