Even with the great Genndy Tartakovsky behind the screen, I held out almost no hope for “Hotel Transylvania,” because even in an animated film for kids, Adam Sandler is never above casting his slew of pseudo talented friends as the supporting cast. Like most Sandler productions, “Hotel Transylvania” can occasionally be loud and silly, but when it reaches down for a heart, it manages to be a sweet bit of family fare.
Rankin Bass’s “Mad Monster Party” (or “Mad Monster Party?”) is a monster bash of animated proportions that brings the great Boris Karloff aboard to lend credibility to an already fun animated film. Comprised of some excellent voice work and some classic stop motion animation from the Rankin Bass studio, “Mad Monster Party” sets down on the geeky and lovable Felix Flankin, a pharmacist with an allergy problem who is called to his old uncle Baron Boris von Frankenstein’s island for a party where he plans to announce to his monster community that he’s giving up the life of monster making and plans to hand over the business to his nephew.
What does your average run of the mill slasher do on his time off? Eventually your hockey masked slasher has to unwind and recharge right? Kristjan Lyngmo’s short animated film is rather genius, in that it not only features a hockey masked slasher, but one of a lineage of hockey masked slashers who divides his time between murdering hapless campers and coming home to deal with everyday problems.
Though it’s often thought of as the film that helped revive the animated film boom from Disney in the nineties, predating a string of hit films from the studio, “The Little Mermaid” is much like “Bambi.” It has amazing animation, and a wonderful soundtrack, but in the narrative frame, it’s unspectacular. While the former film garnered a nearly non-existent storyline with a simple resolution stretched in to ninety minutes, “The Little Mermaid” has almost nothing in the way of reasoning or logic for its heroine’s motives toward happiness.
Pretty much all of the later series from Hanna Barbera included a group of snot nosed teens solving crime along with some odd sidekick. After “Scooby Doo” the company repeated the successful formula thirty times with varied results. Often times it was incredibly awful like “Jabberjaw” and sometimes it was fun like “Space Ghost.” One of the last Hanna Barbera shows to feature that awkward laugh track addition, “Captain Caveman” mixes the studios odd fixation on the stone age, with crime solving teens, and the whole “Scooby Doo” formula to create a pretty decent animated adventure show.
“Help! It’s the Hair Bear Bunch!” is best left for nostalgia fans and animation collectors. While it’s by no means the worst of the Hanna Barbera animated shows, it’s yet another of their derivative titles. If you think you’ve seen “Help! It’s the Hair Bear Bunch!” before then you have. It was called “Yogi Bear.”
Marvel and MadHouse team together to offer fans of Iron Man a really fun and unique animated adventure with Tony Stark and Iron Man. And while it’s short on plot, it more than compensates for that short coming with some dazzling animation, and an excellent sense of pacing that keeps “Rise of Technovore” absolutely engrossing. Though most of the anime efforts from Marvel with Madhouse have the capability of slowing down, “Rise of Technovore” is always moving and always fun.