The Drac pack take a break
The director of ‘Hotel Transylvania 3’ on how the film came to be set on a ship
When triple Emmy-winning animation guru Genndy Tartakovsky 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 $800 million (Dh2.9 billion) out of global audiences but the sequel, undertaken during a massive North Korean cyber attack on Sony, was gruelling work.
“We’re finishing it. And all the executives are getting fired, and all this ugliness is coming out, and we still have to make a funny, entertaining movie,” the 48-year-old filmmaker said. Burned out, Tartakovsy announced very publicly that he had no intention of committing to a third movie — and learned an important Hollywood lesson: never say never again.
The animator decided during a family cruise off northwestern Mexico that transplanting Drac onto an ocean liner could open up comedy doors.
“Some people love cruising and I don’t. I don’t like to be part of the cattle. I like to just do my own thing,” Tartakovsky said in a recent interview on LA’s Sunset Strip.
“So I had all that, and my in-laws were on the ship, so you were with the family constantly, so all these ideas came.”
Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation, out now in the UAE, sees the Transylvanian vampire (Adam Sandler) and his Drac Pack enjoying monster volleyball while topping up their moon tans on the SS Legacy.
It’s plain sailing at first, but then Drac’s daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) realises her doting pop has fallen for the secretive, dangerous ship’s captain.
“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 the 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.
“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,” he says.
Tartakovsky’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,’” Tartakvsky said.
“There’s this double standard where you can make men ugly and then appealing but all women have to be attractive. So we go, ‘Well we want her to be unique looking because unique is also attractive.’”