Despite great music, ‘Trolls’ trudges along
Timberlake tunes may be one of the best things about this tired animated film
I’m shocked that it took Hollywood more than half a century to bring the trolls phenomenon to the screen. To be sure, the little ugly dolls with crazy long hair are featured in the “Toy Story” films. But the poor critters, who were introduced to the American market in the early 1960s, never had a film of their own.
DreamWorks Animation has come to the rescue with its shiny new mass-market product, the computer-animated 3-D family musical adventure “Trolls,” a $120 million extravaganza featuring a nicely varied selection of pop,
R&B, hip-hop and folk songs produced by pop god Justin Timberlake, who sings quite a few himself.
Timberlake does a rousing rendition of “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” He also does several memorable duets — with Anna Kendrick on “True Colors” and “September” and with Gwen Stefani on “What U Workin’ With?” For the funny “Hair Up,” he and Stefani are joined by Ron Funches.
Other vocalists include Zooey Deschanel and Ariana Grande, and there’s even a fun, slightly spooky version of Paul Simon’s “The Sound of Silence” sung by Kendrick.
As for the story, Timberlake and Kendrick lead the cast as a pair of young trolls named Branch and Poppy who team up to save Troll Village, despite having fundamentally opposite views of the world.
Branch, who is given a wonderfully woebegone tone by Timberlake, is a prickly pessimist who’d rather hunker down alone in his hovel than take part in Troll Village’s joy-stuffed daily routine. His lack of joy makes him an outcast.
See, most trolls are like Poppy — psychotically happy, boundlessly optimistic airheads who spend their every waking hour hugging, singing, laughing and tripping the light fantastic under a really big groovy disco ball.
Trolls are small, defenseless creatures who live in a secret corner of the forest. But when Poppy throws a particularly loud bash, their location is discovered by the Bergens, an ugly race of monsters whose only joy in life is the taste of raw troll, sushi-style.
ABergen chef (Christine Baranski) swoops up the revelers one by one into her fanny pack. Only Poppy and Branch escape. Convinced the other trolls will be kept alive until the Bergen royal family can prepare a public feast, they journey to the lion’s den with a daft rescue plan.
Despite competent animation, the great tunes and funny voice work by co-stars Russell Brand and John Cleese, “Trolls” is a lackluster release. The story is cliched and predictable, and the film lacks any real magic. It doesn’t have the silly yet profound soul of DreamWorks’ Kung Fu Panda films, the heartbreaking artistry of animated masterpieces like “Spirited Away” and “The Illusionist” or the madcap inventiveness of Disney’s “Frankenweenie” and “Zootopia.”
What rankles is that DreamWorks could have made a perfectly magical fable, had they simply told the story of how the troll dolls were invented.
The unisex toy, which has sold millions of units, was the brainchild of Thomas Dam, a Danish fisherman and woodcutter from a small town who had fallen on such hard times in 1959 that he didn’t have money to buy a Christmas present for his beloved daughter, Lila.
As the story goes (it’s mostly factual tale with a bit of myth mixed in), Dam came up with the concept of the Good Luck Troll, as he called it, using ideas from folklore and his own imagination. He hand carved the doll from wood, hoping the ugly little creature would bring Lila joy and luck.
It sure did. Soon other kids in the fishing town of Gjøl wanted them, and orders came flooding in. Dam eventually founded a factory and began massproducing the troll, using vinyl and, eventually, plastic.
This wonderful little origin story is a tale of realworld magic — about love and hope in the face of despair. It’s a treasure trove of narrative ideas worthy of a Hans Christian Andersen.
But instead, we get disco tunes, troll-eating villains and a “Mission Impossible” rescue mission.