Trolls (2016)

Trolls arrives from DreamWorks Animation by way of the Good Luck Trolls doll line, which is to say it arrives from a licensing arrangement with a plot bolted on. The premise concerns small, perpetually singing creatures and the large, miserable Bergens who believe happiness can only be obtained by eating one. Mike Mitchell directs a jukebox musical with the volume knob broken off. The voice cast includes Ron Funches, Kunal Nayyar, Quvenzhané Wallis and GloZell, a detail we can record without concluding that anyone meant it as a statement. The trolls are blobs of hair and glitter. They correspond to no human demographic, and the film never implies they should.

Princess Poppy leads the rescue mission, defies her father's caution, and ends the picture crowned queen. That is a functional heroine's arc, executed with efficiency and no argument attached. Branch, the gray survivalist in the bunker, carries childhood guilt about the grandmother he lost to his own singing. His gloom is a wound to be healed by a musical number, not a condition to be named. There is no LGBTQ content. There is no environmental theme, no critique of the Bergen monarchy as an economic system, and no body-positivity message, despite the variety of troll silhouettes on display. The film is about candy and it knows it.

The moral, delivered with a light hand, is that happiness lives inside you and cannot be eaten. Bridget the scullery maid gets her king. The Bergens learn to sing. It is sweet, it is brief, and it does not lecture, which is more than most animated offerings manage. On the ledger of modern social consciousness, this one keeps its balance near the floor. A toy commercial with a Grammy-winning single, and no ambitions beyond that. We classify it accordingly and move on.