Rent Hotel Transylvania: Transformania (2022)

Hotel Transylvania: Transformania (aka Hotel Transylvania 4) review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

The fourth Hotel Transylvania film resorts to the easiest of premises. It’s a fittingly appropriate scenario for a series that seems on its last legs, where characters find themselves placed in the shoes of others. It’s sometimes called the brain-switch story, where characters switch bodies or roles. In this case, monsters and humans switch roles. On this basis, this is a more bearable entry in the simplistic saga of monster mash antics.

The story once more revolves around Count Dracula unwilling to accept his son-in-law of the human Johnny. Though Johnny means well, he ends up aggravating the aged vampire more than he’d care for. So when Drac plans to retire and hand over the keys to his monster hotel to his daughter Mavis, he’s hesitant when realizing Johnny will get a piece of that property as well. Not content to do so, even when promising his recent wife of Van Helsing’s daughter he wouldn’t stand in their way, Drac invents a lie that Johnny can’t have the hotel with some monster-exclusive real estate law.

Seeking to be more accepted, Johnny gets some help from Van Helsing with a magical wand that turns him into a dragon. Johnny thinks this is great and wants to show Mavis but Drac tries to undo the damage. In doing so, however, he not only wastes the powers of the wand but becomes a human himself. Together, Drac and Johnny will go on an adventure to power up the wand and revert back to themselves or stay in their new states forever. Of course, such a trip is the perfect time for them to learn what it’s like to be in the opposite shoes.

So, yeah, there’s some low goals with this film but they’re goals that can be met with ease and some smiles. I found myself smiling with a few fun bits of a vampire learning to be a human and human learning the powers of a dragon. Dracula gets to feel pain of staring into the sun, the oddness of sweating, and the sting of mosquitos. It leads to some great gags as well as some down moments of tenderness between the father and son-in-law. Of course, the shifting of monster to human also happens to a handful of monsters in the hotel with a few solid visual gags. The invisible man is revealed to be naked and the mummy becomes a flabby elder who can barely keep with others.

I guess I found myself more engaged with this film more than the others because the designs are pretty unique. The same old designs are shaken up with new and invigorating redesigns. I really loved the dragon that Johnny turns into, becoming an elongated beast with big and bold features that fall all over the place. Credit goes to the animators for trying to replicate that snappy and dynamic style Genndy Tartakovsky perfected with the first film. Oh, and there’s also no musical climax where all the characters sing and dance. There’s a point where they almost do but the film quickly cuts away to the 2D-animated credits.

Transformania still does have all the mediocre elements present in most of the series, however, but they’re less vocal this time around. It’s for this reason why this is the more passive of Hotel Transylvania movies, if nothing else than because you won’t have to endure something as nauseating as the Macarina finale of the last movie.