Tim here. Today marks the DVD/Blu-ray release of Trolls, the 33rd feature film and only the second musical made by DreamWorks Animation, and a recent Best Original Song Oscar nominee (and if I may say so, the wrong song got honored, but whatever).
We haven't talked about the film much at all here at TFE, and this seemed like the best possible reason to correct that lapse. For a lapse it is: despite its 100% boilerplate plot, vaguely inspired by a line of toys that haven't been popular in more than two decades, and its wall-to-wall "pop songs and dance parties" structure, Trolls is, like, pretty good, y'all. It is, undoubtedly, assembled according to some Modern Kiddie Cartoon Mad-Libs: a crabby outsider, from a community dominated by one personality trait, finds himself in the position of being forced to save the day when catastrophe hits. By the end of the movie's trim 92 minutes, we've learned that real happiness was inside of you all along, and true beauty comes from confidence in being yourself.
It's not exactly that the filmmakers behind Trolls (directors Mike Mitchell and Walt Dohrn and screenwriters Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger, of the Kung Fu Pandas but also the Alvin and the Chipmunkses) revitalize this ancient form. Rather, they pack the film with so many inspired fiddly bits that it's easy to like the good and simply ignore the bad...
The good, in this case, starts with Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake (who also wrote the original songs and produced the soundtrack), both having an audibly fun time as, respectively, the manic troll princess Poppy, and the misanthropic Branch, forced together to save their people from a race of carnivorous ogres (the most carnivorous of whom is voiced by Christine Baranski, who hasn't been so inspired in anything in years).
They're a pretty great pair to headline what amounts to an upbeat jukebox musical, one that's really mostly about having fun pairing slightly unconventional arrangements of enormously conventional songs with bright colors – it is, really, a summertime pop hit given movie form, and indeed Timberlake's Oscar-nominated "Can't Stop the Feeling!" was precisely such a song. Anyway, the film's narrative explicitly hinges on the fact that singing along with easy songs is a hell of a lot of fun, so it's all good.
Also good: the film's animation and design, which is unbelievably creative. I can't name any one of DWA's 32 previous films that used the animation medium itself in such creative ways (How to Train Your Dragon and its sequel are prettier and more complex, but not more creative). Perhaps taking its cues from Poppy's incessant scrapbooking, perhaps positioning itself inside the imagination of some never-seen child, Trolls takes place in a world made entirely of cloth and handicrafts. The characters are slightly fuzzy, like plush toys or flocked plastic, they wear clothes made out of what's obviously felt, the natural world is a riot of cotton balls and scraps of woolen blankets and reclaimed socks. Even the night sky is full of perfect little five-point stars, like glow-in-the-stickers on a sheet of blue paper. It is, all told, one of the most splendidly designed animated worlds that any major studio has produced in the age of 3D CGI, tactile and tangible, feeling like something that genuinely evokes childhood imagination, rather than adults attempting to force imagination onto children. And to explore this world, the directors indulge in a series of sweeping, big, weightless camera movements that have more energy than virtually any American animated film this decade.
I should certainly hold back from going crazy and saying that this is enough to make Trolls a great film. No film with such a barbarically routine screenplay could ever be great. But it is remarkably likable, and that's already quite an achievement, given everything stacked against it. It's utterly endearing to look at it, the overstuffed soundtrack is fun and appropriately mindless, and even if the characters go through arcs that are pre-ordained from the instant that we meet them, at least they're enjoyable company. It's all a bit sugary and lightweight, and I think it's more or less designed to make Kendrick seem unbearably cloying if you find her even a little bit annoying (which I think is not likely to be true of a majority of TFE readers). But it's better than just good enough for parents to watch with their kids. Certainly, as a fan of inventive animation design, I'd put this on par with any other animated feature of 2016 for sheer visual delight.