Monster High

I actually want to like this more than I do. There are little flashes where the reboot remembers that Monster High should be weird: Draculaura secretly practicing witchcraft, Frankie dealing with the strange implications of having multiple brains, Clawdeen navigating the fact that she doesn't fit neatly into either human or monster society. Some individual episodes even find a nice rhythm between supernatural nonsense and teenage insecurity. The premiere establishes that immediately—Clawdeen discovers Monster High through her mother's amulet, gets rejected because she's human, and then proceeds to prove that the school's definition of “monster” might be a little more fucking complicated than its administration would like. But across the series, the mythology sometimes expands faster than the characters can metabolize it. Every emotional problem seems to arrive with a magical mechanism attached, and the show can confuse constant escalation with actual development. The animation is polished and colorful, but it also pushes the franchise toward a much softer Nickelodeon-comedy register; compared with the fashion-forward attitude and horror-pop aesthetic associated with earlier Monster High, this version feels deliberately safer and younger. That's not automatically a flaw—the series is clearly targeting a new generation—but it changes what the franchise feels like. And that is where the ick comes in: I can see the reboot strategy working perfectly well as a way to introduce Monster High to younger kids, but as a whole series, too much of the old bite has been traded for lessons, lore dumps and aggressively wholesome chaos. The ghouls aren't dead; they're just on a very restrictive fucking diet.