Trolls World Tour
★★★
Dirs: Walt Dohrn and David P. Smith (1hr 31mins) (U)
It should have been the big box-office hit of the Easter break, but owing to the pandemic, DreamWorks Animation’s latest film has become something more historically significant, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph – the first major studio movie to launch on streaming platforms rather than in the multiplexes. If enough people stump up the £16 fee to watch it at home, it could signal the end of cinema-going as we know it. And they just might. “Radioactively cheerful”, the film is the perfect “tonic” for families in social isolation – and even better than the original Trolls in 2016, “which itself set an impressive new standard for films based on novelty keyrings and pencil toppers”.
It has the same “aspartame hyperactivity” as its predecessor, but I found it more “robotic”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. The story begins as the original pop-music-loving Trolls discover that five other Troll tribes exist, each devoted to a different genre – and that the Hard Rock tribe have a fascistic plan to impose their taste on the rest. In the end, all come to value “harmony and diversity”, which is ironic given the film’s own visual and aural monotony. It’s actually a “cavalcade” of colour and glitter, said Clarisse Loughrey on The Independent – but it’s “weird and imaginative” too, and featuring cameos from the likes of Ozzy Osbourne, George Clinton and even Jamie Dornan as a smooth-jazz fiend whose music conjures a dreamworld of “island sunsets, white tigers and all-you-caneat sushi”. Available from Sky Store, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and others.