Drawing blood for Drac’s return

WHEN triple Emmy-winning animation guru Genndy Tartakovsky ( right) put together the final touches for 2015’s Hotel Transylvania 2, he decided he’d had enough of his old pal Count Dracula.

The razor-fanged quincentenarian – that’s Drac, not Tartakovsky – has sucked a bloodcurdling US$800 million (RM3.25 billion) out of global audiences but the sequel, undertaken during a massive North Korean cyber attack on Sony, was gruelling work.

Burned out, Tartakovsy, 48, announced that he had no intention of committing to a third movie.

Having rejected the offer to direct a script he didn’t like, the animator decided during a family cruise off northwestern Mexico that transplanting Drac onto an ocean liner could open up comedy doors.

The result is Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation.

The deep blue has always been a reliable comedy backdrop. “You’re just trapped in a space, all together. So usually good comedy comes from that,” says Tartakovsky, who also took on crytpwriting – sorry, scriptwriting – duties.

The acclaimed creative behind Cartoon Network’s Star Wars: Clone Wars, Samurai Jack, and Dexter’s Laboratory has been making children’s comedy for the best part of three decades.

His experience, he says, has taught him that the secret to writing effectively for kids is, well, not to write for kids.

“As soon as you think: ‘Pirates are really popular right now with kids so I’m going to write a pirate movie’... that’s when you’re dead,” he tells AFP.

The director sticks to writing what he finds funny, placing trust in his ability to come up with material that youngsters will enjoy too, rather than trying to alter his sense of humour.

“Kids are smart. They pick up on that stuff, when they’re getting talked down to. So you’ve got to talk at that level and, hopefully, you’ve got a good sensibility that kids think is funny.

“But I don’t know what a kid thinks is funny to begin with.”

Drac’s antagonist is the seductress Ericka van Helsing – a character critics have pointed out looks more like a pneumatic Olive Oyl than a conventional beauty.

“We don’t want to just do a generic, beautiful, unoffensive, very nice model face. We wanted to have character and personality as much as Dracula,” Tartakovsky says. – AFP-Relaxnews Panther: Long Live the King Hawkeye