Trolls Band Together (2023)

Trolls Band Together arrives as the third installment of a franchise built on dolls, jukebox standards, and an aggressively cheerful color palette, and it conducts itself with the weary professionalism of a boy band on a reunion tour. The premise concerns Branch's estranged brothers, a disbanded quintet called BroZone, and a rescue mission that requires the sort of family harmony only animated features can weaponize. It is competent, loud, and entirely content to be a product. The film knows what it is, which is more than most of its characters manage.

Where social consciousness registers, it registers faintly. The voice ensemble is stocked with performers of color and queer performers, and the studio plainly enjoys the optics of that roster, yet the trolls themselves remain color-coded fantasy creatures with no racial interiority to speak of. No romance, no identity, no text. The closest thing to a thesis is a thin satire of pop stardom: Velvet and Veneer are fame-hungry siblings who literally bottle and drain another artist's essence to power their own vocals. It is a sharp enough image for a children's film, and it stops well short of implicating the machinery that produced the movie we are watching.

Poppy and Viva carry a sister-reunion thread, and a female antagonist gets the best musical numbers, but the picture argues for family togetherness and then sells a soundtrack. The moralizing arrives through song, which is the least confrontational delivery system available to the species. A pleasant, harmless, meticulously focus-grouped confection. Score it as such.