TROLLING THE TROLLS

World Tour just doesn’t have the same charm as the original animated movie

If Trolls World Tour were as sparkly, enchanting and all-out maniacal fun as Trolls, the 2016 dolls-r-us fantasy that I found to be one of the singular animated pleasures of the last decade, it would have found its place among movie goers.

Trolls World Tour, which was made by one of the original film’s directors, Walt Dohrn (now co-directing with David P. Smith), has the same delectably tactile and distinctive eye-candy look as Trolls; it’s set in a storybook kingdom that’s all sweetness and light and glitter. And since a key element of the first film’s charm was how unabashedly it used pop music not just as the usual aural wallpaper but to colour in the ecstatic spirit of the Trolls, Trolls World Tour, as its title suggests, is even more of a music-drenched fairy tale.

The film opens with a cool-looking land of Trolls that’s different from the one before

— a darkly pulsating Day-glo nightclub kingdom that turns out to be the home of the Techno Trolls, an enraptured tribe of disco revellers. Their rave is then invaded by spaceships designed like mini-dungeons. They’re a fleet led by Queen Barb (Rachel Bloom), monarch of the Hard Rock Trolls. She has arrived, with villainous fervour, to stamp out any music that is not her own.

If you sense a rather loud metaphor for the intolerance of others, you’d be right. Our eager, floppy-pink-haired heroine, Poppy (Anna Kendrick), is now queen of the Trolls (or as the movie comes to brand them, the Pop Trolls), who receives an invitation to join Queen Barb’s One Nation Under Rock World Tour, not realizing that it’s actually a tour of oppression. Poppy climbs into a hot-air balloon to go meet her sister Troll queen, with the ever-forlorn Branch (Justin Timberlake) along for the ride, but not before the two learn that there are, in fact, six tribes of Trolls, all divided up by musical passion. The Trolls quickly grew hostile to each other’s tastes, resulting in a land of colonies that sound like Sirius XM channels.

In theory, all of this should be setting the table for a true jukebox jamboree. But when it comes to playing out its musical mythology, Trolls World Tour is an agreeable but rather one-dimensional slowpoke road movie.

Trolls World Tour is available on demand.