Trolls World Tour (2020)

Trolls World Tour arrives as the second installment of a franchise built on small plastic dolls with improbable hair, and it conducts itself with the confidence of a film that has read a sociology syllabus and wishes to discuss it. Six tribes of Trolls, each devoted to a genre of music, live in separation until Queen Barb of the Hard Rock Trolls decides that uniformity is simpler. The voice cast is genuinely broad, drawing from pop, funk, hip hop, country and K-pop, and the film's structure is organized around the proposition that distinct communities deserve to remain distinct. This is a cultural-difference allegory, plainly stated, and it is not shy about stating it.

The picture also revises its own mythology. We learn that the Pop Trolls, ancestors of our heroes, once attempted to impose their music on every other tribe, which reframes the cheerful protagonists as the descendants of cultural imperialists. It is a bold move for a children's property, and it exists mainly to set up the closing lesson, delivered directly to an audience of assembled Troll children, about different voices in harmony. Poppy and Barb occupy the two thrones, though the film's interest in gender is incidental. It wants to talk about culture, not power.

Where the film declines to go is equally instructive. There is no environmental parable here, no indictment of the music industry's economics despite the obvious target, no meditation on bodies or minds that differ from the norm, and no romantic configuration beyond the heterosexual confession in the final act. It is a jukebox musical with a moral, a sequel to a toy commercial, and it carries its lesson the way a touring act carries equipment: efficiently, and without much reflection on why.