It's almost time to check back into the Hotel Transylvania as the sequel to Sony Pictures Animation's hit 2012 animated feature, Hotel Transylvania 2, arrives in theaters on Friday, Sept. 25.
The whole monstrous gang is back for the second installment of this scary, funny kids' comedy. However, there are a few changes to the film this time around. For one, Dracula (Adam Sandler) has now decided to allow human guests to stay in the Hotel Transylvania. However, the biggest change of them all could be the most difficult for Drac to deal with as his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) considers leaving the hotel to raise her half-human, half-vampire newborn Dennis with her mortal husband Jonathan (Andy Samberg). Drac's old-school dad, Vlad, is also making a surprise visit to the hotel, and he might not be too happy to hear that his great-grandson isn't a pure blood.
At least we have legendary director and animator Genndy Tartakovsky returning to this franchise to direct Hotel Transylvania 2 and help us get through all of this drama. Hotel Transylvania 2's more exaggerated, CG animation may seem like quite the departure for Tartakovsky, who made a name for himself creating the beloved Cartoon Network animated series Dexter's Laboratory, Samurai Jack, which Tartakovsky recently told T-Lounge he hopes to revisit some day, and Star Wars: Clone Wars, all of which feature his signature angular, comic book-like style. However, the action and physical comedy that the animation of Hotel Transylvania 2 helps get across to viewers makes it clear that this is a Tartakovsky production.
Tartakovsky recently spoke with T-Lounge over the phone about the animation in his new movie, the challenges of working in an ever-changing technological landscape and what he's got in the works for the future.
For Hotel Translyvania 2, I heard you used a "pushed" animation style, so I was wondering if you could explain what that means and how that was used in the film?
So, basically, we kind of continued further from what we did in the first movie. You know, it was kind of an exaggerated, kind of a cartoony style. Doing the second movie, we had Drac become a grandfather, so we wanted to kind of push the way he looked and the way he talked with his grandson. And so we pushed the facial animation more, you know, more range of emotion from him, more range of expressions, and really just the second time through with this kind of animation style, we were able to get a lot of our animators back from the first movie and really push the style even further.
What kind of challenges did you have facing you and your team for Hotel Transylvania 2?
Well, really, most of the challenges in movies nowadays, I mean for me, it's really kind of just create the story. You know, just try to get the story right, trying to work on the story to make sure that everything else that we follow with, animation-wise and technical-wise, that it supports the story. Adam Sandler and Robert Smigel wrote the script, and we just kind of worked with them and do the [story]boards and try to really figure out the best version of this movie we could do. That’s really always kind of the most challenging stuff.
As you mentioned, Sandler co-wrote the script for Hotel Transylvania 2, in addition to again lending his voice to Dracula and serving as an executive producer on the film. Was he kind of more involved in the production or animation aspect of the sequel?
Adam is very hands-on in all his films, so [he and Smigel] kind of want to see everything. So, they saw all the animation as we were doing it, and yeah, they have comments here and there and stuff. But you know, the animation comments they have are really more minimal compared to the stuff that they do on story and stuff.
How do you go about making monsters and scary creatures funny in the Hotel Transylvania films, especially when they're mainly targeting children?
The key there is we focus on the humor. We took a take on the monsters that they're real people, and they're funny. So, if we have people like Kevin James, David Spade, Keegan-Michael Key and Steve Buscemi playing the roles, you're already starting from a really comical point-of-view. Actually, the thing that was most challenging was Vlad, Drac's dad, because initially, we wrote him as this old-school, powerful, overbearing character, and we made him kind of scary at first. And we started to realize, oh, you know, this doesn't feel totally right for the movie. So, once we got Mel Brooks to do the voice, all the comedy came out, and it was more in the proper tone of the movie. So, that's kind of the thing that we always juggle. We know what the tone is. It's kind of like a really silly romp. We don't take ourselves too seriously. And we try to fit everything else in. Sometimes, we try to keep things bright so it's not too dark, so it doesn't seem as scary, like our nighttime sky is actually like a really bright blue.
The animated series you've created in the past are much beloved. Would you ever return to TV in the future?
I wouldn't mind. I think TV is sometimes more creatively satisfying because, you know, every week, like say on Samurai Jack, we were able to do something new and different. We really challenged ourselves. Oh, this week, we're going to fight zombies, and so, we'll do a real scary one. The next week, we're going to do a rave, and so we'll do it not as scary and just do more focusing on the dancing and the music. So, that was really fun creatively, but then the speed makes you suffer, because we have to go so fast. We have limited budgets, and so, we just go as fast as we can. Everything that we do is really our first instinct.
The opposite of that is in films, we have great budgets, huge amounts of time, but then, you know, you have to prove that it's right over and over again, and you have to convince everybody that what you're doing is right. Whereas in TV, it's like, yup, that looks good, and then six months later, we saw it on the air. So, that part of it is more challenging. There's something definitely about doing something from your gut, putting it down on paper and then, it's on TV.
Last year, you announced that you are working on a new animated film called Can You Imagine?, and I was wondering if there was anything you could tell us about any new developments with that?
Recently, we had a screening of the first act, and it went over really well. Like, a lot of the comments I got from the artists were that they were super-excited, and it felt fresh and new and different. Now, we're just kind of going to tweak the story to make it cleaner, better, and that's kind of the progress of it so far.
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