Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #167 Trolls (2016)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.
Or you can be like Todd in the Shadows, and have me write about a whole bunch of films about music, including Madonna’s many movie misfires, U2: Rattle and Hum and now the psychotically cheerful 2016 animated jukebox musical Trolls.
Trolls is about a gaggle of rainbow-haired, ugly-adorable creatures who aren’t just happy: they’re goddamn ecstatic, joyful, perpetually overcome with positive sensations so powerful that they have to express them through music, dance, glitter bombing, giant raves and hugging everyone they meet.
So even though Trolls is technically based on the Good Luck Trolls, a plastic doll line created by Danish woodworker Thomas Dam I think we all know that it’s actually inspired by the notorious children’s book The Magical Neon Creatures That Were Blasted Out of Their Minds on MDMA All the Time.
Computer animated kid’s films these days seem to be pitched equally at small children whose growing young minds crave music, sensation and spectacle and adults who are stoned out of their gourds on edibles or Molly and consequently also seek music, sensation and spectacle.
Trolls is a stoner movie for children that cleverly undercuts its psychotic cheerfulness and Day-Glo good vibes with a surprising amount of darkness.
This unexpected and refreshing morbidity begins with the revelation that the Trolls, the happiest creatures in the world, a joyous tribe of revelers whose lives consist of dancing, singing, partying, having fun and indiscriminate hugging, live in a state of profound disharmony with a brutish tribe of goblin-like depressives known as Bergens who can only achieve happiness by eating Trolls.
The ghoulishness extends to making Branch, the film’s male lead, a paranoid, misanthropic survivalist who has devoted his life to hoarding food and building a bunker for the inevitable Bergenpocalypse while his more cheerful counterparts devoted their lives to the single-minded pursuit of pleasure.
Branch is right, of course. When Poppy (Anna Kendrick, with just the right note of self-awareness), the daughter of Troll King Peppy throws a massive dance party it attracts the attention of Bergens, who abduct a number of trolls, including Creek, a New Age guru type who turns out to be a selfish heel voiced by Russell Brand in a clever bit of self-parody.
King Peppy is voiced by Jeffrey Tambor, whose presence in movies and television shows these days invariably engenders a powerfully bifurcated dual response in me. Upon recognizing his very distinctive voice, my first reaction is reflexive, unthinking and very positive: I think about how much I’ve loved so much of his past work, particularly The Larry Sanders Show and Arrested Development but also any number of movies.
That immediate rush of recognition and Pavlovian delight in Tambor’s past work is followed quickly by sadness and disappointment in Tambor as a human being who has done some pretty terrible, unforgivable things that will forever taint what is otherwise an impressive legacy.
We see lots of people differently in a post #MeToo world but losing the uncomplicated pleasure I once took in Tambor’s movies and TV shows is ultimately a more than acceptable price to pay for a world with less sexism, less sexual harassment and less sexual assault, a world where women who speak up about powerful men like Tambor can feel seen and heard rather than ignored.
Tambor’s presence is distracting but he thankfully does not have a terribly big role. When the Bergens are abducted and brought back to the Bergen village to be ceremonially eaten by the Bergen boy-king Gristle Jr. (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) at a festival called Trollstice it falls upon the odd couple of Poppy and Branch to save them.
In a sequence that embodies the film’s surprisingly palatable, unexpectedly successful combination of sunshine and ghoulishness, Poppy sings “Get Back Up Again” a chipper little ditty about being resilient and not letting life defeat you while narrowly avoiding getting eaten by an endless series of rapacious, fantastical creatures happy to eat one another if they cannot devour Poppy.
It’s a sequence that simultaneously illustrates the Darwinian savagery of the animal kingdom, where survival of the fittest is the law of the land and death lurks behind every corner, and a spunky young woman’s determination to not let anything bring her down, even brushes with violent death.
When Poppy and Branch make it to Bergen Town the movie becomes a mash-up of Cyrano De Bergerac, Cinderella and Shrek as Poppy and her colorful, crazily coiffed compatriots romantically counsel Bridget (Zooey Deschanel), a Bergen scullery maid in the Cinderella mode who is hopelessly in love with the otherwise hopeless Bergen king Gristle Jr., who looks like a cross between the green M&M, the Mucinex spokes-Mucus blob and a goblin.
The trolls are adorable yet more than a little repulsive. The Bergens, on the other hand, are repulsive yet more than a little adorable, not unlike Shrek and Fiona, the seeming models for Bridget and Gristle Jr’s romance.
Watching this short attention span jukebox musical for babies and people who enjoy using drugs is like wandering around a giant music festival stoned and confused where Paul Simon is playing in one tent and Junior Senior is playing the next tent over, while Justin Timberlake is playing on a main stage so loud that his songs bleed into everyone else’s.
The jukebox musical element of Trolls is notable largely for the WTF/random nature of its song selections. Throughout the movie I found myself thinking things like, “Is this movie about glittery raver trolls on MDMA really trying to harness the somber power of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence?”, “Are they really going to introduce the misery of Bergen Town by having the hideous monsters collectively moan a deeply ironic rendition of Gorilaz’ “Clint Eastwood” as a group dirge?” and finally, “Are they really asking us to believe that the formative trauma of Branch’s life is that his grandmother died indirectly as a result of him singing the Jim Steinman-written Bonnie Tyler hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart?” as a child, leading him to deliver the immortal line, “Singing killed my grandma, okay?!?”
The answer to all of the above questions is hell yeah. Trolls makes a lot of choices that are as bold as they are bizarre and if some of them don’t work the movie’s audacity carries it over the occasional weak spot and rough patch.
Trolls ends on a high note, with the ebullient sounds of Timberlake’s Oscar-nominated number one smash “Can’t Stop the Feeling” infecting the world of the Bergens with palpable, infectious joy and color and life.
“Can’t Stop the Feeling” liberates the Trolls and Bergens alike. Feeling the rhythm in their souls and the groove in their feet liberates these lumbering figures. It connects them to their best, truest, freest selves and allows them to cast off the cold grey misery of their old lives and their old identities.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I got more than a little choked up at the sight of the Bergens shaking off the gloom of their dreary, joyless existences and feeling the life-affirming power of music with their whole bodies.
I did more than get choked up: I fucking cried at the end of Trolls. Is that enough candor for you, you voyeuristic ghouls? Are you happy now? Because I sure was at the end of the film. So happy that I could non-ironically cry tears of joy over how happy all of the Trolls and Bergens were now that they’d opened their hearts to the magic of music and dance.
I’d heard good things about Trolls. It lives up to its reputation both for being weird and for being way better than it has any right to be.
Its sequel, 2020’s Trolls: World Tour looks even crazier but despite my affection forTrolls I probably won’t see watch it unless someone chooses it for this column or one of my small children wants to see it, which means there’s a VERY good chance I will see it in the months and years ahead, something I not only don’t dread but actively look forward to.
Within reason, of course. I’m forever open to dark, pleasant surprises but I am not insane, at least at the moment, that is.
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