'Trolls: World Tour': compulsively upbeat but not necessarily cheerful

In these depressing times, cheering up a ten-year-old with colourful entertainment is an act of mercy. The only problem is that it is by no means certain that Trolls: World Tour will actually cheer him or her up.

Best to check first whether they liked the first DreamWorks (Shrek, Kung Fu Panda) animated film about hyper-optimistic, music-loving trolls, because the sequel is not any better and is just as compulsively upbeat. Poppy and Branch, voiced sweetly in the original film by Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake, discover that Troll tribes are addicted to one of six music genres, depending on the country where they live: Funk, Country, Techno, Classical, Pop, and Rock.

Poppy and Branch don't like the fact that Queen Barb and her father King Thrash (Ozzy Osbourne) want to force every troll in every country to love rock. They travel around the world to organize the resistance. The predictable story is rather thin, but there is a whirlwind of bright colours, even brighter joyfulness, and buckets of – partly censored – music, and that was enough to make the first Trolls a big hit.

TROLLS: WORLD TOUR
US, 2020, dir.: Walt Dohrn, Daniel B. Smith