Trolls

Dirs: Mike Mitchell and Walt Dohrn 1hr 32mins (U)

Fizzy animated feature Tiny, Day-Glo-coloured toys with “voluminous vertical hair”, trolls were a craze in the 1990s. Now they’ve been given their own movie, said Allan Hunter in the Daily Express, “a bouncy, glittersmeared sugar rush of an animated feature”. The premise is that the trolls are happy, cuddly creatures living in a tree, whose one fear is being eaten by their lugubrious neighbours, the Bergens. After some of her friends are captured, perky Princess Poppy (voiced by Anna Kendrick) sets out to save them with the aid of a cynical friend (Justin Timberlake). They pause only to burst into song every few minutes. “Not since The Magic Roundabout has an animation had me so urgently wondering: what exactly are these people on?” said Jonathan Romney in The Observer. Nevertheless, the “visual invention is delirious”, the colours “eye-popping”, and it’s all “immensely entertaining”. But a little too “precision-tooled” for my taste, said Andrew Pulver in The Guardian. Call me old-fashioned, but I long for a kids’ movie that “isn’t full of sassy one-liners from wised-up pre-teens”. It ends up feeling a bit soulless.