“Trolls World Tour”: Its theatrical release an early victim of the coronavirus pandemic, Universal offered “Trolls World Tour” as a digital rental in April, which the studio said broke records as its biggest debut for an original digital release. The colorful animated family flick reunites the main characters from the 2016’s “Trolls,” as Queen Poppy (voiced by Anna Kendrick) and Branch (Justin Timberlake) once again set off to save the kingdom.
This time the threat comes from the Queen of the Hard Rock Trolls (Rachel Bloom), who aims to take over all the Troll kingdoms, each of which represent a different musical genre: Pop, Funk, Classical, Techno, Country and Rock. As Poppy and the gang witness the ravaged Symphonyville and later become imprisoned in Lonesome Flats (turns out a bunch of sad country-singing trolls aren’t wooed by the “rad medley” Poppy et al sing to cheer them up), Cooper (Ron Funches) embarks on a quest to find trolls that look like him, and is found to be royalty in the Funk kingdom (unsurprisingly the most fun, out-of-this-world Troll kingdom).
Eventually the threat becomes an existential one. What happens when one tribe wants total domination, destroying all other types of music? Is it better to have separate tribes in separate kingdoms, or does the Troll universe achieve harmony in coexistence?
It’s a nice, especially timely message for kids and parents, though a clunky one at times via the script, written by Jonathan Aibel, Glenn Berger, Maya Forbes, Wallace Wolodarsky and Elizabeth Tippet. We encounter subgenres like K-pop, reggaeton, smooth jazz and yodeling via rogue characters, not quite knowing where they fit in (one character points out that Poppy’s kingdom map, which contains disco, is “outdated”). The Queen of the Hard Rock Trolls eventually reckons with the fact that forcing the homogeneity of hard rock on all the kingdoms makes it impossible to be unique. Branch’s seemingly unrequited love plotline takes a backseat to the tunes. But in the end, the music of the six strings makes the music of the spheres, and that’s something worth singing about.