Review of Trolls (2016) by Ceb1031 — 29 Jun 2017

There are certain animated films — like, say, “Inside Out” — that achieve rarefied levels of feeling, imagination, and head-boggling audacity. In their kid-friendly way, they aim high and sail over the bar of their own ambition. But in our desire to celebrate them, let us not overlook the unadulterated magic of a Day-Glo ride for tots like “Trolls.” On the surface (and what a surface! — it just about pops your eyes open with delight), the new feature from DreamWorks Animation, distributed by 20th Century Fox, may not be the kind of blatantly brainy and profound adult-movie-in-toon-drag we’re accustomed to seeing from Pixar. Yet the enchantment that “Trolls” achieves is all too real and, in its way, quite pure. Kids should adore it, but don’t let that scare you — the movie is every 3D psychedelic inch a fairy tale for adults. It’s another antic pop-culture whirligig, with some of the fast-moving prankishness of “The Lego Movie,” but it has a touching theme that dips into a major issue — namely, what’s the nature of happiness? “Trolls” is the right film to pose that question, because it’s an ecstatically happy movie, a giddy EDM kiddie musical that sends you out on a high.

A storybook prologue done in felt colorforms tells us that Trolls are “the happiest creatures the world had ever known.” That makes sense if you think back to your own childhood connection to the iconic Troll Dolls, created in 1959 (as the Good Luck Trolls) by the Danish toymaker Thomas Dam. They had androgynous cherub baby faces with big marble eyes and grins so wide it creased their cheeks, bellies that bulged with just a bit of prominent navel, and, of course, those electroshock billows of cotton-candy hair that seemed to shoot right out of their soft plastic heads. The hair, which came in different wild colors, was their most defining feature, yet what really made the Troll Doll special is that it seemed to be beaming, with an innocent mysterioso knowingness. It’s no accident that the dolls got big in the early ’60s: Away from their outfits, they looked like naked angels reborn as baby hippies. That made them, to a kid back then, the coolest toy in the universe.

“Trolls” was produced in cooperation with the Dam Family, but the movie makes no fetish of Troll Doll nostalgia. It’s very much a present-tense Troll movie, and though it’s always light and fun, there’s nothing quaint about its motivating conflict: The Trolls live like blissed-out Hobbits in the middle of a woods, but they also live in fear of their sworn enemy — the Bergens, a tribe of giant dyspeptic ogres who are miserably unhappy but don’t want to be, and the way they’ve devised to become happy is: to eat Trolls. They do it ritualistically, once a year, on the day they call Trollstice.