Hotel Transylvania 2

Genndy Tartakovsky’s 2015 sequel runs on a wait rather than a plot. Dracula’s grandson Dennis still shows no sign of fangs, and the middle of the film hands itself over to a monster training camp while the story stands still. The real work sits in the animation. Karl Herbst of Sony Pictures Imageworks has described poses pushed so far past the rig that nothing physically simulated could be trusted, with skulls changing size and limbs growing longer and shorter. Animators painted the smear into the performances by hand, the studio rewrote its motion blur so each object holds a sharp leading edge and trails behind itself, and garments were rebuilt shot by shot as the limbs stretched. Tartakovsky says the big closing brawl is where he tried out the slow motion comic punches he had been saving for the Popeye film he never got to make. Mel Brooks voices Vlad, Dracula’s father. The opening weekend beat the first film, 48.5 million dollars against 42.5 million, and the worldwide total passed 475 million. A good fit if you want the joke carried by deformation rather than dialogue, with hands smearing into streaks across the frame. Not for anyone planning to watch the series in order: the fourth film, Transformania, skipped cinemas, changed directors and replaced Adam Sandler as Dracula.