Trolls Band Together Review

You have to hand it to the Trolls movies: Though they’re technically a craven bit of IP-mining, there’s nothing about a once-faddish line of extravagantly coiffed dolls that suggests it would make sense as source material for multiple sugar-crazed jukebox musicals. Over the course of what’s now a full trilogy, a battery of filmmakers has worked hard to inject creativity into a seemingly dead-end idea. Befitting its go-big-or-go-bigger sensibility, this huggable extended acid-trip of a kiddie series is at its best when working itself up into a state of tuneful delirium, sending troll queen Poppy (Anna Kendrick) careening through deeply weird animated landscapes, mashing up decades’ worth of pop hits along the way.

Plot Summary

So it’s a bit of a bummer when Trolls Band Together opens with an obligatory pathos-laden flashback focusing on Poppy’s glum boyfriend Branch (Justin Timberlake). In the first of several retcons, the movie reveals that Branch spent his diaper-wearing years as the youngest member of a five-troll boy band with his heretofore unseen brothers. It would make sense for Timberlake’s former NSYNC bandmates to play these parts, but, confusingly, they do not, as the movie defers this gag until much later. – instead, the BroZone ranks are filled out by Eric André, Troye Sivan, Daveed Diggs, and Kid Cudi. Years after their partnership dissolved in the wake of failing to hit the “perfect family harmony,” the brothers must reunite to rescue Sivan’s Floyd from sibling pop stars Velvet (Amy Schumer) and Veneer (Andrew Rannells), who are sapping his talent to keep their careers afloat. Poppy, a BroZone superfan who somehow had no idea Branch was in the band, is more enthused about this mission than her standoffish partner.

Mission and Structure

The structure is promisingly similar to a classic Muppet movie, in that this small group of trolls must visit a number of locations, recruit more characters, and pause for song breaks. They even encounter characters who resemble old Muppets, as part of Trolls’ mission to make big-budget computer animation look genuinely eccentric and sometimes even handmade, embracing character designs that intentionally clash with the leads’ straightforward cuteness. Velvet and Veneer, for example, resemble a shiny, unholy cross between pre-Bugs Bunny Looney Tunes and the Slender Man. The movie has fun recognizing its own aesthetic derangement, making a number of parent-targeted allusions to various characters’ seeming sexual incompatibility and/or promiscuity. (It’s a particularly strange turn for a series that’s always seemed unsure how much actual romance to tease out of the Poppy/Branch relationship.)

Emotional Storylines

These grown-up jokes are funny, and also a bit much, which is basically the Trolls mission statement. Its ongoing bacchanal of goofiness here makes a particular drag out of Branch, who spends a lot of the movie tediously, if understandably, fuming at his capricious siblings (and it is difficult to generate much sympathy for a quartet of older brothers who ditch a baby, even in cartoon form). Branch’s storyline is supposed to provide some emotional grounding – the movie tees up one of its central lessons about the dangers of joyless perfectionism within its first two minutes – but in doing so pulls focus from Poppy, whose subplot mirrors Branch’s, which is to say it’s a shameless photocopy: She has her own long-lost sibling to find, a plot turn that’s clunky in both its coincidences and its lampshading of those coincidences.

Critique and Conclusion

Maybe the attempts to tug at heartstrings feel like wasted time because regardless of whatever hastily conceived backstories director Walt Dohrn and his crew assemble, every Trolls movie so far winds up exhausted (and exhausting) by its final stretch. That’s especially true of Band Together, which introduces around 10 new characters while trying to keep in touch with half a dozen figures from the previous movies, all in under 90 minutes (if you don’t count the credits). So it almost doesn’t matter that, say, the design and vocal work for a character like Crimp (Zosia Mamet), Velvet and Veneer’s harried mop creature of an assistant, is amusing and inventive; she’s shuffled on and off screen in too much of a frenzy to make any difference.

Even the usually-reliable musical numbers start to feel like they’re being rushed off the stage; the mash-ups and remixes often play out like abbreviated medleys. The affectionate riffs on boy-band culture (like how all of BroZone’s song titles involve the words “girl,” “baby,” and “love”) don’t differentiate this movie’s overzealous poptimism from its predecessors as much as they’re supposed to. Kids who liked those earlier movies will probably still have a good time here, and fans of the series’ freewheeling visual style will find eye-widening delights. By the end, though, these trolls are starting to feel pretty road-weary.