Summary
Trolls is served with enough knowing self-awareness that it has the sense to frequently mock its own glittery good cheer. Parents will like that. And kids will adore everything else
When you have kids, the first thing you want them to do is cry. After that, all you want them to do is stop crying. Sometimes you think their tiny lungs will belch out sticky wails forever. When they get older, it seems like all they want to do is kill themselves. Out the door, in the oven, up the stairs, down whatever hole they can find. You try to hypnotize them with television and bits of plastic. Rarely works. You’re so tired you legitimately think you might die. You can’t imagine how lucky you would feel if the kid just sat down, quietly, and watched a movie. It’s a pipe dream. Eventually, they do. But kids don’t watch movies, plural. They watch movie, singular. The same movie again and again and again. Relentlessly. Every once in a while, I snap a DVD across my head and cry a little bit. It just gets too much. Then I feel bad, and another movie gets introduced to the household. And the cycle begins again. What I’m trying to say is this: Trolls is a movie that I will eventually headbutt.
There’s a recipe for these things, I think. A very specific set of ingredients that alchemize into a movie scientifically designed to be adored by kids and despised by parents. Trolls has some of the best chefs in the business. It’s co-directed by Shrek and SpongeBob hand Mike Mitchell, and written by the Kung Fu Panda scribes, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger. They’ve put together a functional story and stuffed it with absurd flights of fancy and fun, charismatic actors. What more could you want?
As it turns out, you get quite a lot of 80s disco classics as well. The colourfully coiffured, rubber-faced homunculi that you used to find stuck on the end of pencils are so pathologically happy that they often burst into song-and-dance routines just to take the edge off. They hug a lot, too. They have little devices on their wrists that bleep and flash every hour to let them know it’s time for a cuddle. Trolls is like that.
The happy-clappy fun is eventually interrupted by a tribe of hideously dour ogres, the Bergens, who believe that the only way to find true happiness is to eat the trolls. So off they trot with a pouch full of DayGlo entrees, leaving the rescuing duties to Princess Poppy (Anna Kendrick, Self Reliance) and her miserable mate, Branch (Justin Timberlake – also executive producer on the soundtrack).
There are other stars knocking around – Russell Brand, Gwen Stefani, James Corden – but the leads really carry Trolls. If it were up to me, Anna Kendrick would be in more of everything, but she’s absurdly well-cast here, and Justin Timberlake is pleasantly low-key as the cynical sidekick who, for predictably hammy reasons, doesn’t sing.
Eventually, I’m going to hate this movie. Eventually. But right now, it’s tough to dislike something so upbeat and visually inventive. I’m hardly the target demographic here, but Trolls is served with enough knowing self-awareness that it has the sense to frequently mock its own glittery good cheer. Parents will like that. And kids will adore everything else.
