Since the post-WWII period, pop culture has moved in 20-year waves. The 1970s saw nostalgia for the 1950s, which gave us American Graffiti, Happy Days and Grease. In the '90s, folks were nostalgic for the '70s — hello, That '70s Show. (Absolutely no one was nostalgic for the Great Depression 1930s in the 1950s, or ever.) But nostalgia seems to be slowing down lately: 1990s nostalgia only hit in the late 2010s, and then only very minimally, like how the sitcom Friends — not a remake but just streaming reruns, basically — boomed again when the series landed on Netflix.
This leads us to these damn CGI-animated Trolls movies, which are part of the slow '90s nostalgia, I guess. Like a recursive pop-culture inception: The original Troll dolls, those horrid little wastes of carbon-intensive plastic with the shocks of neon hair, were a thing in the '70s and then — as dictated by the aforementioned nostalgia rules — they reappeared in the '90s.
Too young for Troll dolls in the 1970s and too old for their nostalgic reappearance two decades later, I am pop-culturally incapable of mustering any interest in them.
And yet, I didn't hate this the latest entry in their cinematic franchise, Trolls Band Together. It's not quite up to the level of the second entry in the series, 2020's Trolls World Tour, but it's slightly better than the original 2016 Trolls.
Does it even matter what is going on in these movies at this point? Little kiddies will be drawn in by the gentle chaos of its nonstop candy-colored assault, and as that's deployed here, it's fine. The Trolls franchise is genuinely good-natured, sweet without being sappy, and it's hard to dislike.
With the series' initial antagonists, the troll-eating Bergens no longer a threat after being tamed by the irrepressible cheeriness of Poppy the troll (Anna Kendrick), new conflict is needed in Band Together. It comes in sibling drama, as troll Branch (Justin Timberlake) reconnects with his previously unmentioned brothers. They were once — also previously unmentioned — a boy band called BroZone, but they broke up long ago. However, now they must come together to rescue one of their own, Floyd (Troye Sivan), who has been kidnapped by evil pop music sibling duo Velvet (Amy Schumer) and Veneer (Andrew Rannells), who are stealing Floyd's singing mojo to fuel their own success. Velvet and Veneer are not trolls; I dunno what the hell they are, but they look like creepily caricatured homo sapiens whose dark magic is taking place in a nightmarish parody of Las Vegas (which is, inherently, redundant).
The road trip that Branch and Poppy go on to rescue Floyd is more welcomingly trippy than typical kids' movies. There's a bit where '70s-ish disco music ignites a detour into a psychedelic animation style, distinct from the modern, pleasantly blobby CGI that characterizes most of the movie. There's a stop at an abandoned troll theme park that is visually grim but also forcefully cheery as Poppy rather bizarrely meets a long-lost sibling of her own, Viva (Camila Cabello). It's a plot sidetrack that feels shoehorned in so that Poppy has something to do besides support Branch. Maybe the best weird thing is the strange living RV that the gang uses on their journey: It's like a giant worm (on a troll scale) that looks like a Studio Ghibli escapee.
I admit that I have been defeated by this odd franchise. Its dedicated nonstop weirdness is admirable. It's disappointing that there's no song anywhere near as good as the incredibly catchy and danceable "Can't Stop the Feeling" from the first Trolls movie, but it makes up for it by depicting a world in which curious beings of all provenance — trolls, ogreish Bergen and many others — have learned to live together in harmony while respecting one another's differences. In a world in which brand names are increasingly forcibly yoked to "entertainment" for the benefit of corporate profits more than audience enjoyment, these silly Trolls movies have managed to, at the very least, not be actively off-putting about it.♦
Trolls Band Together