One of the things that sucks about being an animation nerd is having to live with the fact that, from a technical standpoint, the Hotel Transylvania movies are absolutely ground-breakingly staggeringly incredible.
As completely ignorant on animation, why is that? How is Hotel Transylvania any good??
The short version is that they’ve been figuring out how to plug the strengths of traditional animation into cg animation.
Longer version: cg animation is essentially puppet animation. You build a model, paint it and dress it up, and then move it around. That’s why Pixar’s first animated film was about toys, and their second one was about bugs: it’s much harder to make something look convincingly soft and fleshy than it is to work with something that’s supposed to be rigid.
Working inside this paradigm, the progression that makes sense is to work on developing more and more articulated puppets. Figure out how to add fur (Monsters, Inc.), move fish (Finding Nemo), get to the point where you can actually make human puppets who look appealing (The Incredibles.) In 2012 the big animated feature films showed off huge strides in particle physics (The Guardians), and hair (Tangled, Brave). Character effects and lighting were really hitting their stride, and the general movement was towards more detailed models, increased realism, richer and more intricate environments. The models only had so much range before they started to break, so squash & stretch was never going to be as pronounced as something from drawn animation could be. Hotel Transylvania challenged that.
As a show creator and director, Genndy Tartakovsky’s always shown a preference for stylization. He’s also got a reputation for incredible and deliberate timing, spectacular silhouettes, dramatic movement and clear staging, and just overall really good at directing animation. He wanted Tex Avery-type animation in CG and by golly, he did it.
Look at how exaggerated those shapes are, and how snappy, smooth, and fast the transitions between each one: that’s not something that was really being done. The motion-blurring alone was so defining that apparently Sony calls it a “Genndy blur.”
Animation is essentially the art of movement: the better the movement, the better the animation, and the Hotel Transylvania franchise has spectacular movement.
The model is actually being resculpted for maximum exaggeration, and the smears and blurs make the transitions between each pose fast, energetic, and snappy.
Like. Look at that movement. Look at how tightly he’s rooted while the follow through of his clothing sells the hard stop of each hip bump. Look at how sharp and deep his knees are bending, the way his weight shifts onto his heels and that tiny little side step at the very end, where he keeps his weight on his right foot for a split second before popping over to his new position. And he’s dancing the Macarena because he had to find the most brain-dominating, toe-tappingist song in the universe to win a DJ battle where a Kraken was being driven into a murderous rage by a mystical melody and it had to be counteracted by another song.
Yeah.
Somebody once described the Hotel Transylvania franchise as “like seeing Lamborghini making a clown car,” and honestly, that’s kind of what it’s like.
