Trolls World Tour (2020)
The depiction of tribes warring over musical tastes in Trolls World Tour serves as an allegory for how even the best intentioned ideologies turn sour without due respect for difference.
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Spoiler alert: This analysis of the film Trolls World Tour and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.
A couple of weeks back, I took my daughter and niece to the cinema to watch Trolls Band Together: the third instalment in DreamWorks’s series of digitally animated jukebox musicals about small, colourful, singing trolls. I did not think that much of it, aside for some arresting visual experimentation. That’s fine, I’m not the target audience, save to purchase tickets for and accompany my daughter and niece. But I do quite like the first two Trolls films, especially the second one: 2020’s Trolls World Tour, which uses the theme of troll tribes arguing over musical preferences as the basis for a clever allegory about ideology, cultural difference, and tolerance and acceptance.
DreamWorks Animation and the Trolls franchise
Troll dolls were invented by Danish craftsman Thomas Dam in the 1950s, and spread around the world from the 1960s, with episodic revivals in their popularity. DreamWorks purchased the licensing rights to the Trolls in 2013, and in 2016 released the first in its series of films about them. Trolls begins by recounting the story of how its joyful eponymous heroes, led by King Peppy (voiced in this film by Jeffrey Tambor), escaped from the far larger, far more miserable Bergens, who ritually ate them annually in a vain effort to cheer themselves up. It then shifts to the present day, when some of the Trolls are captured from their village and taken back to Bergen Town. Peppy’s relentlessly cheerful and optimistic daughter Princess Poppy (Anna Kendrick), accompanied reluctantly by curmudgeonly, paranoid loner Branch (Justin Timberlake), embark upon a quest to rescue them. They succeed in their mission, and in convincing the Bergens that happiness lies within them, not in eating Trolls. In the process, Branch and Poppy become unlikely friends, and Branch – whose perennial fearfulness is revealed to have arisen from his witnessing a Bergen eat his grandma when he was a child – loses some of his inhibitions, including around singing, and is properly integrated into the Trolls community.
Trolls – along with Shrek, Despicable Me/Minions, Sing, Madagascar, and others – is one of a number of successful franchises launched by DreamWorks since the 1990s, when it established itself as a slightly more subversive rival to Disney.1 Animation scholar Sam Summers has argued that one of the defining differences between the two studios is DreamWorks’ tendency to make more sparing use of familiar songs (either in original or re-recorded form) rather than bespoke soundtracks of entirely new songs. In doing so, it uses the existing connotations of those songs to (straightforwardly or ironically) communicate something about the films’ characters or plots to the audience, as well as taking advantage of licensing agreements for financial gain.2 Summers sees the first Trolls film as in some ways the apogee of this tendency, but not a particularly well-realised one. He argues that the film subsumes the referents of its soundtrack to the requirements of its significantly removed narrative and worldbuilding, such as in the scene when Poppy sings Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sounds of Silence’ to an unappreciative Branch (see below), with little by the way of clear ordering by genre or period.3
Trolls World Tour
Trolls World Tour makes far more deliberately knowing and meaningful use of musical canon and genre than its predecessor. It begins with a rave held by the luminescent, fish-like Techno Trolls being interrupted by the arrival of the hostile Queen Barb (Rachel Bloom) and her Rock Trolls, who force them to surrender and hand over their ‘string’. The setting then shifts to Troll Village, where Poppy is now Queen, having succeeded the retired Peppy (voiced by director Walt Dohrn) as leader of the Trolls, and Branch is revealed to have developed growing feelings for her. An invitation arrives from Queen Barb, inviting them to join her Rock Trolls and others in uniting their strings and bringing the Trolls together in harmony again. Peppy reluctantly reveals that theirs is but one tribe of Trolls, the Pop Trolls, and that there are five others: the Rock Trolls, Techno Trolls, Classical Trolls, Country Trolls, and Funk Trolls. He shows Poppy a scrapbook telling the tale of how all the trolls once lived together and possessed a magical lyre that gave them the gift of music, only for their inability to stand each other’s taste in music to cause each tribes to go their separate ways, taking their respective strings with them.
Against Peppy’s advice, Poppy replies to Barb, warmly accepting her invitation, and then takes the Pop tribe’s string to join her in her quest, accompanied by a sceptical Branch, and their friend Biggie (James Corden). Meanwhile, another of their friends, the four-legged troll Cooper (Ron Funches), also secretly departs Troll Village on his own to find out more about his connection to the Funk Trolls, having noticed his resemblance to the picture of them in the scrapbook. When Poppy, Branch, and Biggie arrive at the land of the Classical Trolls to find it devastated and abandoned, they realises the truth: that Barb intends to capture the other tribes and steal their strings, rather than unite them. Unbeknownst to them, Barb has also promised several bounty hunters representing other, more specific subgenres, that she will spare their music if they capture Poppy. Poppy and her friends then travel to the land of the centaur-like Country Trolls, led by Delta Dawn (Kelly Clarkson) to warn them about Barb. However, when Poppy – finding their music far too depressing – tries to educate them about pop music through a song-and-dance routine with Branch and Biggie, the Country Trolls are so outraged that they throw them in prison. They are then sprung – in the scene shown below – by the mysterious Country Troll Hickory (Sam Rockwell). He promises to take them to Vibe City to warn the Funk Trolls, but they are attacked along the way by one of Barb’s bounty hunters, Smooth Jazz Troll Chas (Jamie Dornan), only for Hickory to again save them. Biggie is outraged that Poppy has failed so spectacularly in her promise to keep them safe, and returns to Troll Village.
Poppy, Branch, and Hickory board the spaceship-like Vibe City, where they are reunited with Cooper, who it turns out is the long-lost son of Funk Trolls King Quincy (George Clinton) and Queen Essence (Mary J. Blige), and twin brother of the rapping Prince D (Anderson .Paak). When Poppy informs them of her desire not only to defeat Barb but also to reunite the Trolls as one as they had lived before, the Funk Trolls reveal that it was in fact the Pop Trolls who were culpable for the original fragmentation of the tribes, having tried to take the others’ strings. At that point the Rock Trolls attack and the Funk Trolls eject Poppy, Branch, and Hickory for their safety. Branch and Poppy quarrel over her refusal to listen to others, and they go their separate ways. Hickory is then revealed to be not a Country Troll at all, but one of two Yodel Trolls (his brother Dickory had been pretending to be his behind) hired by Barb to catch Poppy; he urges her to flee, but they are ambushed by Barb and the Rock Trolls, who capture her and take her string. Branch is also captured by two rival bands of bounty hunters, the K-Pop Trolls and Reggaeton Trolls, but convinces them both to ally with him to defeat Barb. Biggie, meanwhile, has returned to find Troll Village has also been attacked by the Rock Trolls and most of its population captured; he gathers the few remaining Trolls together to return and rescue Poppy.
At the Rock Trolls’ home of Volcano Rock City, Barb has now attached all of the strings to her electric guitar, and plans to play a concert with it that will turn turn all the captives into Rock Trolls. Neither Biggie’s nor Branch’s rescue attempts succeed, and Branch is turned into a Rock Troll. So too, it seems, is Poppy, but this turns out to be a ruse. She manages to take and destroy Barb’s guitar, and with it the strings, causing the colour and music to drain from all of the Trolls. However, the beating of Cooper’s heart, accompanied by Prince D.’s beatboxing, demonstrates that music can continue without the strings.
Poppy leads a rendition of the film’s finale song, ‘Just Sing’, and the colour returns to her and the other trolls as they join in, including eventually Barb, at the encouragement of her father, the doddering retired King Thrash (Ozzy Osborne). Branch reveals his feelings to Poppy, and she is subsequently shown to be reading a scrapbook about the Troll tribes to youngsters drawn from all of them.
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