Including One About A Vampire

 Real-estate issues are central to new animated titles streaming this week, including one about a vampire (“Hotel Transylvania: Transformania”) and another about mice and cats (“The House”). Plus, Peacemaker from “The Suicide Squad” gets his own series.

‘The House’

“The House,” an animated stop-motion anthology, revolves around the life of a large, grand home. Each of its three short films tells the story of the owners and residents in different eras of the house’s existence, and how they obsess over the home at the expense of the world around them.

In the first film, directed by Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels, a family of humans is given an opportunity that seems too good to be true: Trade in their modest home for a new one that would be the envy of all. In the second, directed by Niki Lindroth von Bahr, an ambitious mouse is trying to flip the house. The third film, directed by Paloma Baeza, is about a cat with big plans for turning the dilapidated house around.

Ms. von Bahr says the concept for the anthology stemmed in part from the modern-day obsession with “being someone through material stuff.” In Stockholm, the Swedish director notes, “you almost can’t walk on the sidewalks because there’s so many bags of trash because everyone is tearing out their kitchens. They want their kitchen to mirror me and my soul and my identity.”

Ms. Baeza says working with animated animals can make stories like “The House” feel universal. “It’s a bit like when you are reading a novel and you apply yourself to it,” she says. “Of course, the cat is a cat, but it can then apply to lots of human beings. It lends a sort of fable-like aspect to it.”

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‘Peacemaker’

When James Gunn was writing 2021’s “The Suicide Squad,” he envisioned the Peacemaker character of the DC Comics crew as an obnoxious bro-as-superhero. The new eight-episode series, “Peacemaker,” takes a deep dive at the flamboyantly costumed killer. Mr. Gunn calls him an alpha dog who doesn’t feel like he fits in, a sexual omnivore, and a political extremist who believes everything he reads on the internet.

The series begins as John Cena’s Peacemaker makes an easy escape from prison, only to discover that he has been allowed to fly the coop to help take out another list of targets. The first three episodes begin streaming Thursday on HBO Max.

Mr. Gunn, who is best known for writing and directing Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” films, says he wrote all eight episodes of the series in eight weeks as a way of turning pandemic anxiety into productivity.

“I definitely needed something to do to escape from my own brain,” says Mr. Gunn, who also directed five episodes of the series. “I imagined it being a TV show, but it wasn’t a career move for me. It was something that I truly did because creatively it invigorated me and kept me distracted while I was writing it.”

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New Release: ‘Hotel Transylvania: Transformania’

The family drama that is the Hotel Transylvania animated comedy film franchise has involved Count Dracula adjusting to the idea of a human son-in-law, welcoming his first grandchild and finding love for himself and a stepmother for his daughter, Mavis.

In the latest film, “Hotel Transylvania: Transformania,” Drac is preparing to ease his way into retirement and leave the hotel to Mavis, and her husband, Johnny. But all goes sideways when he gets cold feet just before making his announcement. He and Johnny (among others) get hit with Van Helsing’s “monsterfication ray,” turning Drac into a human and Johnny a monster.

Selena Gomez returns as the voice of Mavis, and Andy Samberg is Johnny. Adam Sandler, who voiced Drac in the first three installments, is replaced by Brian Hull. The movie begins streaming Friday on Amazon’s Prime Video.

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Jennifer Kluska, who directed the film with Derek Drymon, says that part of the movie’s DNA is that what the monsters experience in their heightened, fantastical world are the same things live-action humans live with every day.

“Families change,” she says, “the dynamics change and that presents new problems and it gets messy and weird, but it’s also beautiful and wonderful and that’s because that’s what families are.”