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Trolls Band Together Movie Review

Trolls Band Together is a 2023 animated musical comedy film directed by Walt Dohrn and starring Justin Timberlake and Anna Kendrick. It’s the weakest entry in the Trolls trilogy.

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“Branch, we’re out of sync. We’ve gone from boys to men,

and now there’s only one direction for us to go: the back streets“

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Poppy discovers that Branch was once part of the boy band with his brothers. When his brother Floyd is kidnapped, Branch and Poppy embark on a journey to reunite his two other brothers and rescue Floyd. The first ‘Trolls’ movie was fun and vibrant while the second one was more artistic and even more energetic. This third movie has that similar energy and visual inventiveness, but in terms of characterization and storytelling it’s inferior.

It is insane to me that Trolls of all things ended up receiving a trilogy. It’s rare to see a theatrical animated trilogy with DreamWorks themselves only making a handful of those. The franchise fatigue is already setting in with this third entry that felt plotless and repetitive throughout with only the animation and the soundtrack making it worth a watch.

Yes, most of the animation is unfortunately your standard colorful CGI, but there are certain moments that featured hand-drawn animation reminiscent of sixties and seventies works such as ‘Yellow Submarine’. Those scenes were pleasantly surreal and trippy. There is also an inspired choice in some of the CGI with water for instance consisting of individual blobs. It’s as if this entire world is a world made of toys.

As for the soundtrack, I liked it to a degree. The jukebox nature to the soundtrack made for a fun time for both kids and parents, but too often the movie focused on older instead of new songs. NSYNC reunited for one song for this film, but there is not a single Can’t Stop the Feeling type of hit in this film unfortunately.

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Trolls Band Together in particular suffered from terrible characterization and plot. What you have here is just your standard heist narrative where they have to rescue Branch’s brother without any more interesting side plots added. Poppy is much less memorable in this installment as this movie is all about Branch and his brothers. The band scenes were suitably fun and kinetic, but the movie clearly favored musical scenes instead of any meaningful character arcs. The humor is a mixed bag too. Some of it did admittedly make me laugh as the humor was decidedly adult-oriented, but the music puns could get overwhelming.