My Friends, the Trolls: A Review of Trolls: Band Together

Everyone needs music. It’s part of the reason we obsess and share what we’ve been listening to at the end of the year when Spotify and Apple Music give us a rundown of our habits. So why is it when a jukebox musical for kids comes around everyone acts like they’re too good to watch it or act like it’s beneath them? Sorry, let me dial it back a bit. Trolls: Band Together is a movie I wish I had as a kid. A movie that makes you want to dance, move your body, and forget the troubles of the playground and be reminded that it’ll be okay.

Set almost directly after the events of Trolls: World Tour, the newest film picks up at the wedding of King Grissle and Bridget. Poppy and Branch are set to attend, but during the wedding Branch’s brother, John Dory comes to ask Branch for his help saving one their brothers who’s being held captive by Velvet and Veneer, the bendy pop star villains. But these movies aren’t about their stories but the characters and music within them. I don’t mean to minimize the Trolls lore but these films are nothing without Poppy and Branch. Queen Poppy (Anna Kendrick) is a peppy, upbeat troll who loves two things: singing and her friends. Branch (Justin Timberlake) on the other hand is her cranky boyfriend, who, over the course of two movies, two holiday specials, and two television shows, has become less cranky and more into singing. Branch develops more in this movie when we find out that he has four brothers who made up a band called BroZone. After a performance goes awry years before the events of Trolls 1, the band breaks up and decides to go their separate ways leaving a baby Branch to go live alone with his grandmother. Naturally, Branch must reunite BroZone in order to free his captured brother from a diamond prison with the only thing powerful enough to shatter it: the perfect harmony.

The animation in all of these movies is nothing to scoff at, in fact, I’d go as far as to say that these movies are some of the best-animated movies of the past decade. They don’t fear experimentation and Band Together keeps up that formula. The world is made of almost every material you can find at an arts and crafts store and offers a tactile sense of depth to the candy-coated chaos of their current adventure. The design of the villains is ‘90s inspired and look like Betty Spaghetti dolls in motion, bending and stretching in ways the genre hadn’t explored in a 3D animated movie besides Hotel Transylvania. There are muppet-inspired trolls, that live on a vacation resort island. When the group needs to get to the next story beat, the car-dog thing (they call it an armadillo, but it looks like no armadillo I've ever seen before) enters “hustle” mode turning the movie briefly into a 2D hand-drawn cartoon mirroring a psychedelic Schoolhouse Rock. If Trolls 4 were to take place entirely inside the warp-speed world of hustle mode, I wouldn’t mind one bit. The film finds a good way to blend every type of animation, and it feels artist's playground, where any idea was something to be explored instead of shot down.

My main gripe with Trolls: Band Together is that for all the ambitious animation swings it takes, I found the story surrounding the visuals to be a bit lacking. If Trolls: World Tour was the Avengers: Infinity War/Avengers: Endgame of the Trolls franchise, this feels more like the world-building sequels that would occupy a lesser slot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Trolls: World Tour laid out serious stakes for the fate of Trolls World and the universe at large. In that one, the music was in danger, and without the music, the trolls couldn’t survive (they lose all their color and fall under a depressive spell, marking death for the trolls). Trolls: Band Together significantly lowers the stakes, instead telling a more personal story about rescuing one of Branch’s brothers. In a way, it’s more personal than World Tour, but I don’t think it really reaches the highs of the last film. All this to say, it still works and my complaint is minor. When the movie reaches its third act and it’s time for all the trolls to work together, I caught myself tearing up at the camaraderie and the overall moral of the film: a good lesson about trusting people and establishing familial boundaries. That’s the magic of these movies, and why I find it so frustrating that people are so quick to write them off. They aren’t meant for adults, but they’re accessible to all. Just because they may seem annoying and off-putting, they have a lot of heart and soul put into them. When Trolls: Band Together was announced, a little bit of my heart lit up because it meant I got to spend some time with my friends again. We’re both in completely different places since we last met, but that’s kind of fun. We get to share our experiences and watch how we’ve changed since our last adventure. To kids, I have to imagine it’s kind of the same way. Their friends are right there with them, singing the songs they like, and finding the common ground that made them friends in the first place.

Not often do you see kids glued to the screen for the entire duration of the movie without fidgeting, but this franchise seems to be clued into exactly when to make the kids move and then lock back into the story. During our screening all the kids around us seemed to be fully invested, even gasping when villainous Velvet did something that wasn’t very nice to Branch’s brother Floyd (Troye Sivan). It’s refreshing to see a children’s movie that doesn’t talk down to kids but plays at their level.

I urge you to give these movies a chance. I know they’re box office juggernauts, and that they’ll make due with or without you, but rarely do you get a chance to feel like a kid again. I think these movies do enough to impress the adult you’re trying to be, while also reminding you of the kid you once were and still have somewhere in you. Anyways, I gotta wrap this up, it’s almost hugtime and I can’t be late.

Trolls: Band Together is now playing nationwide.