Trolls World Tour Review

by: Amanda Guarragi 

Trolls World Tour is a colourful and heartfelt sequel, which brings Queen Poppy (Anna Kendrick) and Branch (Justin Timberlake) back together to discover the history of the Trolls Kingdom. They discover that there are six troll scribes that are scattered around the kingdom, devoted to six different genres of music: Funk, Country, Techno, Classical, Pop and Rock. Queen Barb (Rachel Bloom) from the land of Rock wants to take over the entire Kingdom, by converting everyone into rock zombies.

The story is very well written because each genre of music stems from a certain culture and each land is modelled after the genre of music. It’s a lot of fun to go on the journey with Branch and Queen Poppy because of how the music eventually blends together. It is a bit slow at times because the focus is mainly on the musical medleys and some drag on more than others, or else the mixture of all these sounds is quite refreshing. The reason why Trolls works is because of how they remix the songs while still giving credit to the original sound.

I have to admit I really loved the Rock Trolls because of how dark and edgy they were. Their song choices were awesome and having Ozzy Osbourne cast as Queen Barb’s father was genius. They really captured the essence of rock in a kids movie, which is hard to do without going full punk rock. They covered “Crazy Train”, “Barracuda” and “Rock You Like A Hurricane” so well and Rachel Bloom knocked each song out of the park.

The whole point of Trolls World Tour is that everyone is unique in their own way. Each genre of music is different but is needed to blend different sounds together to make another form of music. They have used music kingdoms to represent different cultures and they actually acknowledge their differences. They addressed that the Pop genre has taken credit for the music that has come before it. Queen Poppy struggles with the idea of wanting everyone to get along and be the same but each troll has a unique musical spirit that should be acknowledged based on their culture.

I loved the integration of different music and the animation from DreamWorks was top tier. They use different animation when retelling stories from the past from the Trolls Kingdom and it flows so nicely from scene to scene. The cast in this sequel was jam packed and it was great to recognize some familiar voices like Kelly Clarkson, Mary J. Blige, Kenan Thompson and Sam Rockwell. It’s such a fun film and it has a beautiful story that creatively addresses how we all need to come together and celebrate each other’s differences, so we can live in harmony with music.