Film Name: 精灵旅社 / Hotel Transylvania
118 years ago, Count Dracula and his wife were singled out as outsiders, criticized and driven out like class enemies. His wife was burned to death, yet she left behind a spark of life. The actions of those people back then were perhaps truly reminiscent of the “Red Guards”—hysterical, cloaked in the name of justice. People always preach tolerance on one hand, yet spare no effort in excluding those who are different on the other.
118 years later, Count Dracula still judges humanity’s cruelty based on that era’s impressions. Thus, he forbids his daughter—that most precious spark of life—from venturing into the world. Indeed, he hasn’t interacted with humans for over a century, unaware that those “Red Guards” have now become a new generation raised on American and Japanese dramas. Have they truly learned tolerance? Perhaps it’s more accurate to say they’ve simply grown accustomed to treating tolerance as an amusing game.
In truth, it wasn’t that Dracula, the vampire, was accepted by humans. Rather, Dracula himself had been assimilated by humanity, becoming one of them rather than an outsider. He sings, dances to disco, and even raps. While you marvel at the boldness of this concept, what truly makes you laugh isn’t the humor arising from the incongruity between his vampire identity and such behavior. Rather, it’s the comforting realization that former class enemies are inevitably assimilated by cultural soft power.
In Knights of the Zodiac, born at the tail end of the Cold War, there’s a scene where Leo Saint Aioria single-handedly storms the Bronze Saints’ headquarters, taking on every challenger who dares to fight him. Though America had long pursued ideological soft power against the Soviet Union, militaristic Japan still prioritized force as the primary solution. Yet, if we look at “Hotel Transylvania,” we see that a hundred monsters and demons might not stand a chance against a single human “spy.” Carrying a large backpack, he ventures alone to the monster hotel. Without martial arts or magic, he relies solely on his words to spread his culture within the hotel, and the monsters are swayed. Of course, if this soft cultural invasion were combined with a touch of seduction and intermarriage, there’d be no reason for the elves not to “surrender.”
I recall a vampire in the Japanese anime “Count Dracula,” yet he remained true to himself despite experiencing love with a human. Thus, the cultural perspective of Japanese animation truly differs from that of American animation. As a new generation raised on American and Japanese dramas, we should think more critically when absorbing these influences.
Beyond that, this film might be overly influenced by Finding Nemo, as both essentially tell the same story: a mother dies, leaving a single father who overprotects his child, stifling his freedom to grow. On the surface, the child matures from infancy to adulthood, but in reality, it’s the adult father who undergoes the true growth.
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