Under normal circumstances,??????? ???????? ??? ???? ???? Trolls World Tourwould be a totally fine piece of kiddie entertainment, an animated movie cute and clever enough to enthrall the little ones without antagonizing the grownups.
Under the circumstances we're in right now, Trolls World Touris...well, it's still that. But it's also a boon to families eager for a new distraction during social distancing, and its earnest if unoriginal message of harmony and togetherness may even resonate a teeny bit harder.
The film wastes no time getting to the fun stuff. The first five minutes alone include covers of three separate songs, with dozens of trolls bopping to the beat each time. Along the way, it recaps the last film and sets up the premise of this one: Queen Barb (voiced with adorable attitude by Rachel Bloom) is set on conquering all the troll kingdoms under the banner of rock music, while back in Pop land, the blissfully unaware Queen Poppy (Anna Kendrick) sets out to befriend her.
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Trolls World Tour may not amount to much more than a distraction, but as distractions go, you could do worse.
Poppy's circuitous journey takes her across many troll lands, each with its own musical style and star-studded cast: Ozzy Ozbourne as a Rock troll, Kelly Clarkson as a Country troll, George Clinton, Mary J. Blige, and Anderson .Paak as Funk trolls, and so on. Few of them stick around long enough to make much of an impression, but they do provide plentiful opportunities to play "hey, isn't that—?" with the cameos.
To Trolls World Tour's credit, it treats this diverse range of inspirations with respect and thoughtfulness, even throwing in a gentle lesson about pop music's history of cultural appropriation. International acts like J Balvin and Red Velvet perform in their own languages, rather than translate themselves into English. And the film is insistent that no one style is more valid than another — to the contrary, as one character chirps, "real harmony takes lots of voices, different voices."
As for the actual music, however, the sharp edges and rough textures of these genres have been sanded down, leaving a bunch of numbers that sound kinda like Heart or Psy or Cyndi Lauper but mostly just sound like Trolls. The soundtrack is a decent starting place for children still expanding their musical horizons; adults with access to Spotify will be more satisfied listening to the real deal.
Poppy (Anna Kendrick) and Branch (Justin Timberlake) have a halfhearted romantic subplot, for some reason. Credit: Dreamworks Animation Similarly, the look of Trolls World Tourdefaults to bright and inoffensive, rendered in kid-friendly textures like felt and glitter. Occasionally, though, the film will detour into the weird and wild, as in a drug-trip sequence where the drug is, um, smooth jazz, or a glimpse into the rich inner life of a wormlike pet named Mr. Dinkles (Kevin Michael Richardson). They're some of the most riveting parts of the movie, and I wish there had been more of them.
Add up all those elements, and Trolls World Tourlands somewhere between a movie you'd onlywatch if a six-year-old forced you, and a movie you'd gladly watch all by your grown self. Right now, though, it has the added bonus of feeling like the closest you can get to taking the family out to a concert.
So rock out to its too-slick covers, laugh at its dumb dad jokes (including one self-aware joke about dad jokes), dance along to its relentless beats. Let yourself get sucked into this candy-colored universe where an enemy might be won over by a song and a stadium show is an epic party rather than a source of contagion. Trolls World Tourmay not amount to much more than a distraction, but as distractions go, you could do worse.