Like a trolling stone
Presuming that Trolls Band Together represents the conclusion of DreamWorks Animation's Trolls Trilogy - and given DreamWorks's historical and ongoing shamelessness about resurrecting any franchise whose brand name seems to have a few dollars left to squeeze out of it, this is a terrible presumption - the least we can say is that leaves us with an awfully consistent set of movies. Not, necessarily, "consistently good", though I quite enjoyed 2016's Trolls, and by no means regret having spent the time with Trolls Band Together (which I'd further declare to be an unambiguous improvement over Trolls World Tour, the film with the gloomy distinction of being the first major studio release to try making a go of an exclusively-digital release strategy after the world stopped turning in spring 2020). But the experience of watching any given Trolls movie is remarkably similar: the script kind of sucks, it's frustratingly half-baked as a musical, and the visuals are pretty damn cool, attempting to push against the hegemonic rule of photorealism in American CGI animation mostly through texturing, but also character movement.
I leave it to the individual to decide whether "the script is very weak" is sufficiently counterbalanced by "the animation is extremely impressive but mostly only in a way you'll notice or think about if you're, like, 'into' animation", but I'll also here add some nuance. Script-wise, Band Together probably goes beyond "weak" into "actively terrible"; it's a busy mess with at least three subplots that don't really talk to each other and don't feed into the main conflict, except in that all of the characters get jammed into the big action climax wherever they'll fit. One of the plot threads is so generic and predictable that the script (credited solely to Elizabeth Tippet, one of the small army of writers involved in World Tour) tries to make a big dumb joke about it, which I guess sort of works if you think that "haha, don't even worry about the story, there's not a single surprising coming here, don't even pretend that there are stakes here" is a winning artistic strategy. The joke-writing that's strictly focused on "this is a brightly-colored adventure comedy for children" works well enough, but the jokes for adults (and this being a DreamWorks picture, it's not really surprising that there's such a bright white line between those two categories) are a snide mishmash of snarky old pop culture references, new pop culture references that are so snarky they're practically nihilistic, and one character who has almost no lines of dialogue that aren't pointing back towards "she wants to try out every new sexual position that she can think of". And this last theme at least has the benefit of being startling enough to be actually funny, though it's still weird to have such single-entendre sex jokes in a children's movie.
On the positive side of things, this is maybe the best that any of the Trolls movies has been at being an actual musical, which to be fair is an extremely low bar and should not be construed as me claiming that Trolls Band Together is jam-packed with wonderfully choreographed numbers. In fact, it has only two (with a fragment of a third), one of which is also a car chase. But that's enough to make it the most satisfying movie in the franchise as a musical, not least because the car chase musical number is quite attractively executed, with ample cross-cutting, lots of energetic flying camera movements, and a blinding spectrum of every color imaginable, as long as it's bright. And that gets us to the most singularly positive thing I have to say about Band Together: it is one of the most visually inventive, playful, and fun-looking animated films DreamWorks has put out, which at this point is awfully close to saying "of any 3-D animated film made in the United States". And to be sure, one of the most" is a key phrase there; DreamWorks is still less than one year out from having released Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, which I still might consider to be the single most visually forward-thinking CG animated features made by an American studio that doesn't have the term Spider-Verse in its title. Comparatively, Band Together's innovations are a great deal more sedate and un-special, so I would be reluctant to make too strong of a claim on the film's behalf solely on the basis of its animation technique.
It's really damn good technique, though. The overriding strength of the first Trolls (and not, to my mind, the second one so much) is still very much in evidence: the texturing that has been applied to literally every single surface including the characters evokes children's handicrafts, with felt and yarn and paper cut-outs everywhere you look. This film has gone even further in that direction: whenever the film shows bodies of water, the close shots reveal that the waves and ripples and all are comprised of thousands and thousands of tiny bead-like particles. It's a trick they've stolen pretty directly from The Lego Movie, almost a decade old at this point, but it's a great trick, and one that anyways hasn't been overused in the intervening years; also, the way it plays out in Band Together is much more beautiful and much less jokey, creating a smooth, organic movement out of what is visibly solid material. There's something enormously charming about it in the way that doll furniture is charming, with the awareness that it's a miniaturised parody of reality is so much more special than just being reality.
The whole movie feels a bit like a laboratory for playing with new examples of the series' defined aesthetic: another great highlight is a new race of magical creatures, these not-exactly-anything-specific figures who feel like Dr. Seuss drawings that were translated into three-dimensional sock puppets by Sid & Marty Krofft, complete with distinctly sock-esque teturing. And then... here's where words start to fail me, they don't "feel like stop-motion animation" in that they have the juttery quality of stop-motion, but weirdly they feel like stop motion that has been smoothed out digitally. They're not, I am certain - they're just normal digital models. But they have a weirdly tactile presence and they don't quite move like any other figures in the movie. On top of this sort of thing, the movie indulges itself in a couple of 2-D animated sequences done by Titmouse, Inc., a studio that will always live in a warm place in my heart for their work on the later seasons of The Venture Bros. In this particular case, the style is a straightforward but quite successful pastiche of the kind of '70s psychedelic animation that was kind of stale, reheated leftovers from '60s psychedelia, if that distinction makes sense; at any rate, it has the wormy fluidity and underground comix design mentality, and it provides a wonderfully strange interlude right in the middle of a movie already prone to strangeness.
My favorite thing out of it all, though, is certainly the villains, who... Lordy Moses, I haven't talked about the story at all, have I? Goes to show how interesting it is. So basically, the grumpy troll Branch (Justin Timberlake), consort of Queen Poppy (Anna Kendrick) of the pop music trolls, used to be in a boy band that is broadly speaking a parody of every boy band from the late '90s and early '00s, and specifically is used to remind us all that Timberlake's career started when he was a member of *NSYNC. And, for what it's worth, *NSYNC has briefly reunited to provide a new original song to the Trolls Band Together soundtrack, of such extreme narrative consequence that it plays over the end credits. The only non-shitty member of Branch's old group (who were all brothers, now horribly estranged) has been kidnapped by these two humanoid creatures named Velvet (Amy Schumer) and Veneer (Andrew Ranells), who've become the biggest pop stars in the history of their species, by draining Branch's brother of his talent like singing vampires. So Branch and Poppy, and Branch's shittiest family member John Dory (Eric André), go on a quest to stop them. This is interrupted by a sideplot where Poppy meets her own long-lost older sister, Viva (Camila Cabello), now the joyful but paranoid leader of a group of trolls living in hiding. It is not interrupted by a sideplot that just wanders off on its own track entirely, where reformed troll-eating ogre king Gristle (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and his new bride Bridget (Zooey Deschanel) go on their honeymoon, a stunningly pointless add-on to the whole movie whose chief point of interest is that Deschanel, who gets all of those dirty jokes I was talking about before, has just so clearly lost interest in this film and is amusing herself with a whispery, breathy vocal performance that just completely defies my ability to describe it, or to explain why director Walt Dohrn didn't try to stop it.
Anyway, whatever. Kids' adventure movie stuff about reconnecting with old family member you hate, dig it. So the villains, Velvet and Veneer, I have no idea what story purpose is served by their design, but I'm completely infatuated with the design anyway. It's so unbelievably bizarre. They're basically human shape but very elongated and skinny, made out of these flexible white metallic tubes, with rigid green tubes for their hair, and anime eyes applied to their perfectly smooth, flat faces. The best I can do is that they feel like Japanese animation had taken its cues from one of the '30s animation studios you've never heard of, like Van Beuren or Terrytoons, instead of Disney, and focused on keeping rubber-hose animation alive into the 3-D era. I don't think I realised until I saw it here that I've never actually seen an attempt at rubber-hose animation in CG, not that I can recall, certainly not with the chaotic physics of the animation of these characters. They glide and flow across the screen with some inhumanly clean, stretchy movement; they feel genuinely alien in this setting and in 3-D animation generally. It's strange, a little gross, and extremely gorgeous.
Does this mean the movie is actually good? Good enough for me, anyway. It's a very fast-moving 91 minutes, at least, and rarely to never looked boring even when it was boring, and that's not nothing. Given the standards of American theatrical animation in the surprisingly deserted year of 2023, it's even kind of a triumph.
Reviews in this series
Trolls (Mitchell with Dohrn, 2016)
Trolls World Tour (Dohrn with Smith, 2020)
Trolls Band Together (Dohrn with Heitz, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
I leave it to the individual to decide whether "the script is very weak" is sufficiently counterbalanced by "the animation is extremely impressive but mostly only in a way you'll notice or think about if you're, like, 'into' animation", but I'll also here add some nuance. Script-wise, Band Together probably goes beyond "weak" into "actively terrible"; it's a busy mess with at least three subplots that don't really talk to each other and don't feed into the main conflict, except in that all of the characters get jammed into the big action climax wherever they'll fit. One of the plot threads is so generic and predictable that the script (credited solely to Elizabeth Tippet, one of the small army of writers involved in World Tour) tries to make a big dumb joke about it, which I guess sort of works if you think that "haha, don't even worry about the story, there's not a single surprising coming here, don't even pretend that there are stakes here" is a winning artistic strategy. The joke-writing that's strictly focused on "this is a brightly-colored adventure comedy for children" works well enough, but the jokes for adults (and this being a DreamWorks picture, it's not really surprising that there's such a bright white line between those two categories) are a snide mishmash of snarky old pop culture references, new pop culture references that are so snarky they're practically nihilistic, and one character who has almost no lines of dialogue that aren't pointing back towards "she wants to try out every new sexual position that she can think of". And this last theme at least has the benefit of being startling enough to be actually funny, though it's still weird to have such single-entendre sex jokes in a children's movie.
On the positive side of things, this is maybe the best that any of the Trolls movies has been at being an actual musical, which to be fair is an extremely low bar and should not be construed as me claiming that Trolls Band Together is jam-packed with wonderfully choreographed numbers. In fact, it has only two (with a fragment of a third), one of which is also a car chase. But that's enough to make it the most satisfying movie in the franchise as a musical, not least because the car chase musical number is quite attractively executed, with ample cross-cutting, lots of energetic flying camera movements, and a blinding spectrum of every color imaginable, as long as it's bright. And that gets us to the most singularly positive thing I have to say about Band Together: it is one of the most visually inventive, playful, and fun-looking animated films DreamWorks has put out, which at this point is awfully close to saying "of any 3-D animated film made in the United States". And to be sure, one of the most" is a key phrase there; DreamWorks is still less than one year out from having released Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, which I still might consider to be the single most visually forward-thinking CG animated features made by an American studio that doesn't have the term Spider-Verse in its title. Comparatively, Band Together's innovations are a great deal more sedate and un-special, so I would be reluctant to make too strong of a claim on the film's behalf solely on the basis of its animation technique.
It's really damn good technique, though. The overriding strength of the first Trolls (and not, to my mind, the second one so much) is still very much in evidence: the texturing that has been applied to literally every single surface including the characters evokes children's handicrafts, with felt and yarn and paper cut-outs everywhere you look. This film has gone even further in that direction: whenever the film shows bodies of water, the close shots reveal that the waves and ripples and all are comprised of thousands and thousands of tiny bead-like particles. It's a trick they've stolen pretty directly from The Lego Movie, almost a decade old at this point, but it's a great trick, and one that anyways hasn't been overused in the intervening years; also, the way it plays out in Band Together is much more beautiful and much less jokey, creating a smooth, organic movement out of what is visibly solid material. There's something enormously charming about it in the way that doll furniture is charming, with the awareness that it's a miniaturised parody of reality is so much more special than just being reality.
The whole movie feels a bit like a laboratory for playing with new examples of the series' defined aesthetic: another great highlight is a new race of magical creatures, these not-exactly-anything-specific figures who feel like Dr. Seuss drawings that were translated into three-dimensional sock puppets by Sid & Marty Krofft, complete with distinctly sock-esque teturing. And then... here's where words start to fail me, they don't "feel like stop-motion animation" in that they have the juttery quality of stop-motion, but weirdly they feel like stop motion that has been smoothed out digitally. They're not, I am certain - they're just normal digital models. But they have a weirdly tactile presence and they don't quite move like any other figures in the movie. On top of this sort of thing, the movie indulges itself in a couple of 2-D animated sequences done by Titmouse, Inc., a studio that will always live in a warm place in my heart for their work on the later seasons of The Venture Bros. In this particular case, the style is a straightforward but quite successful pastiche of the kind of '70s psychedelic animation that was kind of stale, reheated leftovers from '60s psychedelia, if that distinction makes sense; at any rate, it has the wormy fluidity and underground comix design mentality, and it provides a wonderfully strange interlude right in the middle of a movie already prone to strangeness.
My favorite thing out of it all, though, is certainly the villains, who... Lordy Moses, I haven't talked about the story at all, have I? Goes to show how interesting it is. So basically, the grumpy troll Branch (Justin Timberlake), consort of Queen Poppy (Anna Kendrick) of the pop music trolls, used to be in a boy band that is broadly speaking a parody of every boy band from the late '90s and early '00s, and specifically is used to remind us all that Timberlake's career started when he was a member of *NSYNC. And, for what it's worth, *NSYNC has briefly reunited to provide a new original song to the Trolls Band Together soundtrack, of such extreme narrative consequence that it plays over the end credits. The only non-shitty member of Branch's old group (who were all brothers, now horribly estranged) has been kidnapped by these two humanoid creatures named Velvet (Amy Schumer) and Veneer (Andrew Ranells), who've become the biggest pop stars in the history of their species, by draining Branch's brother of his talent like singing vampires. So Branch and Poppy, and Branch's shittiest family member John Dory (Eric André), go on a quest to stop them. This is interrupted by a sideplot where Poppy meets her own long-lost older sister, Viva (Camila Cabello), now the joyful but paranoid leader of a group of trolls living in hiding. It is not interrupted by a sideplot that just wanders off on its own track entirely, where reformed troll-eating ogre king Gristle (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and his new bride Bridget (Zooey Deschanel) go on their honeymoon, a stunningly pointless add-on to the whole movie whose chief point of interest is that Deschanel, who gets all of those dirty jokes I was talking about before, has just so clearly lost interest in this film and is amusing herself with a whispery, breathy vocal performance that just completely defies my ability to describe it, or to explain why director Walt Dohrn didn't try to stop it.
Anyway, whatever. Kids' adventure movie stuff about reconnecting with old family member you hate, dig it. So the villains, Velvet and Veneer, I have no idea what story purpose is served by their design, but I'm completely infatuated with the design anyway. It's so unbelievably bizarre. They're basically human shape but very elongated and skinny, made out of these flexible white metallic tubes, with rigid green tubes for their hair, and anime eyes applied to their perfectly smooth, flat faces. The best I can do is that they feel like Japanese animation had taken its cues from one of the '30s animation studios you've never heard of, like Van Beuren or Terrytoons, instead of Disney, and focused on keeping rubber-hose animation alive into the 3-D era. I don't think I realised until I saw it here that I've never actually seen an attempt at rubber-hose animation in CG, not that I can recall, certainly not with the chaotic physics of the animation of these characters. They glide and flow across the screen with some inhumanly clean, stretchy movement; they feel genuinely alien in this setting and in 3-D animation generally. It's strange, a little gross, and extremely gorgeous.
Does this mean the movie is actually good? Good enough for me, anyway. It's a very fast-moving 91 minutes, at least, and rarely to never looked boring even when it was boring, and that's not nothing. Given the standards of American theatrical animation in the surprisingly deserted year of 2023, it's even kind of a triumph.
Reviews in this series
Trolls (Mitchell with Dohrn, 2016)
Trolls World Tour (Dohrn with Smith, 2020)
Trolls Band Together (Dohrn with Heitz, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
