When DreamWorks’ original Trolls was released, it wasn’t immediately obvious that the studio was launching a musical franchise. The rainbow-coloured, computer-animated feature boasted a sparkling soundtrack and the voice of Justin Timberlake as the grumpy, grey-skinned Branch, but it wasn’t until the sequel – Trolls World Tour, released straight to streaming during the pandemic – that the series explicitly embraced its Top 40 ‘tude. Now, having survived that film’s rock apocalypse, the saga rewinds to explore Branch’s backstory … as the junior member of a boy band, BroZone, in the zero-calorie sugar high of Trolls Band Together.
If you’re wondering why this is the first time you’ve heard that Branch once played arena concerts – as the nappy-wearing “Baby B” – with older brothers Floyd (Troye Sivan), Spruce (Daveed Diggs), Clay (Kid Cudi) and John Dory (Eric André), just imagine how his girlfriend, Queen Poppy (Anna Kendrick), must feel about the news. She’s a huge BroZone fan, rattling off a list of similar-sounding song titles (Timberlake clearly has a sense of humour about his early 2000s music and hairstyles). Plus, Poppy has always wanted a sibling, telling Branch, “A brother is a friend who can never leave you,” when John Dory shows up years after the band broke up on a mission to rescue Floyd.
Floyd, “the sensitive one”, has been troll-napped by Velvet and Veneer (voiced by Amy Schumer and Andrew Rannells), a divalicious brother-sister singing duo from Mount Rageous who have found a way to extract trolls’ musical talents to enhance their own. The two are tall, pliable white figures with stringy green hair and googly Pac-Man eyes (the way Max Fleischer used to draw them, without the wedge) who want to be famous but don’t want to work for it. It’s not clear how they trapped Floyd in the first place, but now they’ve drained him of almost all his life force and are plotting to trap the other BroZone members.
That’s all you need to know about the plot, apart from the joke that Floyd is trapped in a diamond prison and the band members believe that if they can achieve perfect family harmony, their voices can shatter diamonds. “We’re out of sync,” Floyd tells Branch. “We’ve gone from boys to men, and now there’s only one direction for us: the backstreets.” With gags like this, it’s not clear whether the film is a parody of boy bands or a feature-length advertisement for them. The answer, of course, is both, and judging by the tweens dancing in and out of their seats at the film’s premiere at the Animation Is Film Festival, its target audience doesn’t need an ironic wink to justify the guilt-free pleasure of an NSYNC reunion.
As with Illumination’s Sing sequel, the series has gone from being a music-driven confidence booster for kids to a sales pitch for the ultra-processed mainstream music industry. Here, the soundtrack consists of mash-up ‘oldie’ medleys, including a high-energy sequence that combines the Jackson 5’s ‘Candy Girl’ with New Kids on the Block’s ‘You Got It (The Right Stuff)’ (both songs by sibling bands). The vocals are all auto-tuned to the hilt, but at least we don’t have to deal with those annoying Alvin and the Chipmunks falsettos.
Not all studio toons have to take themselves seriously. So what if Elizabeth Tippet’s script is all one-liners and aphorisms? Directed by Walt Dohrn (who has been with the franchise since its inception), Trolls Band Together embraces its own silliness, with trippy sequences segueing into 70s-style hand-drawn animation. (Like a cross between underground comics and Midnight Gospel, Rhonda’s ‘Hustle’ sequence is surreal in all the right ways). The film is conceived as a feature-length party, with a Bergen wedding, an island resort holiday, an amusement park chase and several concerts – much more fun than the dark and depressing Trolls World Tour.
From the very first entry in the franchise, the artisanal design was a selling point, with flocked skin textures and felt-like production design. That’s still the case here, as the team find creative uses for pool noodles and water beads, giving everything a tactile workshop feel, as if the whole film had been put together in an Etsy seller’s workshop. Even the villains are cute, as is their overworked assistant Crimp (Zosia Mamet). In a world where Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” drastically outsells Martin Scorsese films, haters are trolls, and trolls are just what the audience ordered.
