A brief review of the movie Trolls, by bookplayer, bats, and Jake R · 3:07am Apr 6th, 2018
bookplayer: So, we watched Trolls today. That... is a movie someone made.
Jake R: It looked pretty unremarkable from the trailers
bookplayer: Oh, it's very remarkable.
bookplayer: I'm not sure that's a good thing.
bookplayer: But I'm not sure it isn't, either. We put it on for Trixie, and then James and I found we couldn't do anything except watch it because of the massive WTF.
bookplayer: It's like... someone decided that what the world really needed was a musical for little kids about the 90s rave scene.
bookplayer: With Justin Timberlake and Zooey Deschanel.
bats: Well, I mean, obviously
bookplayer: This movie is a neon pink pacifier dangling from a blue glowstick necklace wearing a neon green and yellow cat-in-the-hat hat.
bookplayer: With mismatched striped rainbow socks.
Jake R: But was it actually a good movie?
bookplayer: No? I mean... I honestly don't know. It's a pretty creative story, with a lot of annoying DreamWorks jokes for kids. But the story is a tough sell, and while everyone involved is giving it their best, it never quite lands. I'm not sure if that's because there's too much story, or too much everything else, or just trying to keep it kids-movie light.
bookplayer: I will say it was far more interesting and entertaining than the MLP movie, but not as well constructed.
Jake R: I see
bookplayer: To give you the idea, you see the trolls are super happy and love to sing and dance to remixed seventies songs, and they are apparently made of E, so these ogres want to eat them because it's the only way they can ever be happy. That's the basic premise.
bats: That's...rather insane sounding
bookplayer: Yes.
*** bats adds to his Netflix queue ***
[A few days later days later]
bats: Okay, what the fuck is this movie
bookplayer: Watching Trolls?
bats: Yes
bookplayer: Trixie woke up last night, and we watched it again. I still have no idea, but I do think I have a mild crush on Branch.
bats: Well, he is Justin Timberlake, so that makes sense
bookplayer: He's also easily the most necessary part. Never has a movie required a voice of reason like this movie does.
bats: I'm not sure I can deal with this movie
Jake R: My only note on Trolls: Timberlake and Anna Kendrick do a really good cover of True Colors
bats: That was really weird and I don't know how I feel about it
bookplayer: That was exactly how James and I felt about it. It's weird to me that all of the reviews seem to be "meh, cute kids movie" without being like "...I'm not entirely sure what I just watched. It... probably wasn't that good? But I couldn't stop watching it?"
bats: It is weird that it went basically unremarked upon. There are some weird kids movies out there, and I'm not sure that Trolls was the weirdest, but it was up there
bookplayer: Well, it turns out that Trixie is directly in the "90 minutes of exploding glitter and flashing neon lights set to bouncy pop music" demographic. So I'll be watching it a lot.
So, in conclusion, if you like to know what the fuck you're watching, Trolls is not for you.
On the other hand, if you're into rainbows, glitter, flashing lights, glitter, scrapbooking, a character that farts glitter, excruciatingly upbeat pop music, glitter, a race of beings made of drugs, a kind of creepy asshole cloud man, glitter, and more glitter... you're in luck! Trolls is... a movie someone made!
So drop acid or be about three years old; these are the only ways to truly enjoy the movie?
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I believe those are the recommended viewing situations, yes. It also works if you have a very high tolerance for camp, weirdness, and glitter.
My brother was actually planning to make a video essay about part of Trolls, which then became an essay about Trolls, The Lorax, and The Emoji Movie, which then got derailed into a video about just The Lorax, because that movie is insanity. It was gonna center on that Bergen chef lady. Specifically, the really weird way she constructs Troll as commodity, because it never fully makes sense. Like, she has to create in the Bergen this notion that Trolls are necessary for happiness, and she's gonna parlay that into power... somehow. It's never entirely clear how that was going to work. And then, at the end, the movie replaces the Troll commodity with the equally commodity dancing or whatever. That the whole thing takes place in the context of a commercial just further muddies the film's strange anti-consumption or whatever message. He still might wind up making a partial essay about it down the line, but that'll probably be awhile.
The Lorax is way weirder though. If you haven't seen it, I think it's worth a watch. The original book had one commodity, thneeds, and the narrative centers on destruction related to that commodity. The movie introduces a second commodity, air, which never has a clear position in society, and then what is essentially a third commodity, trees themselves, because they're now experienced as a source for various positive externalities as opposed to as objects with intrinsic value. That's the basic version, anyway. The full essay is insanity, probably the most dense and intellectual yet, and you should check it out tomorrow when it comes out. Here's the channel, yo.
Edit: Extra thing, I'd recommend the Trolls holiday special thing on Netflix. That musical number about Troll holidays is excellent absurdity.
4834049 So, a very high tolerance for High School Musical, then? The only way I convinced myself to try to watch that was with a Rifftrax commentary. So... I still didn't last more than 5 minutes. Not sure I could handle Trolls...
Trolls was… better than I expected. I was expecting a plotless, plodding, hour-long toy commercial with bad voice acting and a worse script, and instead I got this weird, high-energy music video aimed at little kids that managed to be more entertaining than annoying*. It probably helps that I was watching it with a toddler coming down off of heavy duty pain killers. It probably also helps that I've had to sit through some kids movies and shows that make Trolls look like an Oscar contender.
*except for the random cloud man. That part just hurt.
4834078
I thought her plan was simply that she controlled the troll supply, ergo she wields power greater than the—actually never mind. I'm not sure Trolls is worth that much rational thought :P
4834081
More like a PG Rocky Horror Picture Show, but with more rainbows and glitter.
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I got the impression that the Bergen already had the trolls=happiness idea, and she was just capitalizing on it. But I agree with her plan being... muddled. A few times she indicates that she's somehow going to be queen, and at least once that she wants to kill Gristle, but that seems like something where the explanation ended up on the cutting room floor. Which might not have been a bad thing if they had scrubbed it better, just making it a matter of her wanting her apparently prestigious position back.
But the whole meta-commercial aspect doesn't really bother me. I mean, it is, obviously, but like with MLP that doesn't necessarily mean the creative team was keeping that in mind or even totally on board with it. The nature of how movies and TV shows are made and our relationship with pop culture these days makes it totally possible for a work to be at the same time anti-consumerism and gleefully toyetic, so I don't think it's fair to read that into a work unless it invites it.
I am now forced to live my life with I Will Get Back Up Again playing on infinite loop in my mind.
All hail Princess Poppy
(So this is what going mad feels like...)
4834098 That's not helping!
4834086
May I ask why the toddler was coming down off heavy pain killers?
4834098 She was absolutely playing on an already existent structure. Her role in the film was perpetuating that structure though, usually shown by her trying to force feed king-dude a Troll. Her plan is so murky, and because her plan ties directly into all the different commodities present in the film, it makes how we're supposed to interpret those commodities kinda murky. What is a Troll, precisely? How exactly does it give or remove power? Are the happiness inducing properties of a Troll fact or fiction? One weird aspect of the whole film was how trivial success was. The solution to how to convince the Bergen that happiness is possible without Trolls was literally telling them that that was the case.
As for the meta-commercial aspect, it's not so much some stirring indictment of the film as it is just an interesting part of how the film positions commodities. Not only are they telling us to not consume in order to get us to consume. They're literally telling us to not to consume trolls so that we'll consume trolls. Or, like, maybe buying the trolls is equivalent to consuming troll culture, which is where the film lands at the end? Cause the film isn't entirely anti-consumption. We're just supposed to be selective in what we consume, which makes the underlying claim of the movie, again, pretty difficult to parse. I dunno if the idea of the essay was ever finalized, but the basic thrust of the analysis was about the varying ways the film asks us to interpret commodity, mostly through the lens of this strange Bergen chef, and I think, "Thing we're ultimately supposed to buy," is a somewhat important mode of interpretation here.
4834126
Well, either the kid broke a limb, or a Blazzing meant to put in a comma and “while.”
4834126
4834135
She'd just
escaped from the hospitalbeen discharged after a minor surgery, and needed some serious cheering up.4834127
That is totally true, and I think it's part of the narrative. You see the Burgens happy at various points throughout the movie. Heck, Gristle seems happy in the first scene, just looking forward to Trollstice, even until his father tells him he'll never be happy. Of course, the stated theme of the movie is "true happiness is inside, sometimes you just need someone to help you see it."
I get what you're saying, I just don't think that's a fair aspect to evaluate when you're talking about kids movies/franchises these days. Yes, DreamWorks wants you to buy trolls, Hasbro wants you to buy ponies, Disney wants you to buy Star Wars action figures and Frozen dolls and princess dresses, and the writers, directors, and creative teams of all of these things probably get some notes to that effect. But whether that affects the message or direction of the work depends on how much pressure they exert; it's not necessarily the thing the creative team wants you to buy. In some cases the license holders seem to have faith that just putting something on screen will sell some merchandise, so they just throw some money and/or an IP at some writers, and in other cases they have very specific brands and directions in mind and hire people to make the art they want to sell toys. In the former case they're basically just acting as patrons commissioning an unspecified work, so while you could talk about the hypocrisy of the artists in accepting the job from these people and then subverting their intention, it's not really fair to consider it as part of the message of the work. In the latter case reading the intention as part of the message of the work is fair, since the theme of the work is heavily influenced by it.
Basically, we don't know whether the director was told "make a movie to remind people that trolls are a thing that exists" or "make a movie to sell these specific toys." And that makes a big difference in this kind of interpretation. I'll grant that it was probably closer to the
formerlatter, but without being sure I think we can't count it as a part of what the creative team thought was "the thing you're ultimately supposed to buy." (edit: ...and therefore can't count it as what the audience would take from the work, whether they took it or not.)4834165
I dunno that it's precisely a question of fair and unfair. A major question raised by the movie is, "What is a Troll?" Are they happiness food? Are they a source of great power? Are they exporters of happiness inducing dances? Or are they beings in their own right, with the same rights and capacities as anyone else? The answer is a pretty clear all of the above. But they're also yet another thing, and that thing is a toy. If MLP were to partly center on the question of how we are to interpret ponies, or if we were to generally analyze the work along those lines, then I think the commercial angle would be an important one, and the same is the case for these other works. It's not about some sort of hypocrisy, though that could plausibly be argued. It's about trying to understand the movie, and the role this object plays in it, as well as possible.
My brother said something pretty cool as regards the role of intent in analyzing a work. Why should we leave it up to the creator to tell us how to look at a piece of media? This applies even more when said creator clearly didn't care all that much about the work's messaging. The writers of Trolls are far from the first people I'd ask when trying to understand how to understand Troll as commodity. When analyzing a piece of media, I think you have to, on at least some level, view it as a perfected object. If something is in a movie, then we should partially understand it as something that was meant to be in that movie, and if that element tells us something, we shouldn't ignore that element just cause the writer was supposedly not paying attention to it. Trolls are a lot of things. One of those things is a toy. I think we miss part of the picture if we disregard that, and it doesn't overly matter whether that was supposed to be part of the picture.
Oh right, I forgot Trolls was a movie based on the naked squat kebler cookie lookin' hippie elves from yesteryear. I was thinking of the cinematic classic Troll 2 when I looked at the post
Whenever I accuse something of flinging loud noises and bright, flashing colors at its audience, I will think back to this post and rest assured that people who like that kind of thing exist and they are four.
4834251 Or are on very strong drugs.
I saw this on the seat-back screen of an airline flight from LA back to wherever it is I live now.
I couldn't get the sound to work. I think it was better that way.
Dark Crystal did it first.
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Presumably because BlazzingInferno ran out. It's hard to keep them in stock when you've got a toddler to keep quiet.
Define constructed. :P
Oh man right up my alley.
I never watched Trolls.
I was not a part of the Trolls
epidemiccraze that took place... whenever it took place, so I didn't take it as too much advertising for toys. When my family and I sat down to watch it one night, I just told myself to suffer through it and be done with it. I've not watched it since.But surprisingly enough, it was better than I had expected. I was expecting this overly saccharine main character, but Poppy was more reasonable in her optimism than I would've expected. I was expecting that typical snarkiness in Branch that comes with dissenters, but I found myself liking him. I thought the main character would be this pop-culture-referencing twat, but I found her legitimately villainous (even though her plan to become royalty seemed nonsensical). I liked some of the other side characters (but I did not like the DJ), and I found the dating plotline to be... charming, I guess?
The humor didn't always hit (in fact, when Branch confesses what happened to his grandmother, to have been immediately followed by a joke from the DJ, I cringed), but to me, it was like controlled psychedelia. I was somehow able to follow what was going on, and appreciated how simple it all seemed, and the crazy bits were like spices to the meat of it. I didn't expect it, and am not sure whether I should be ashamed of myself for liking it, but I do. I unsarcastically liked this movie.
But there are a few other movies I like that other people may find weird: The Nut Job, The Swan Princess 5 (yes, really), The Aristocats... I'm a part of the odd group of people.