Trolling Along: TROLLS

Trolls is DreamWorks animation’s attempt to turn the troll dolls into the Smurfs. It cobbles together a flimsy fantasy world for these old toys – nude genderless little goblins with big bright primary color puffs of hair – that finds them in a village in the woods. They’re happy all the time, but live with the memory of having escaped from a race of giants called the Bergens, essentially a city of Gargamels who look like a cross between The Boxtrolls’ villain and the Blue Meanies. (Here’s a confusion I had. Are the Bergens giants? Or are they our size and the Trolls are just doll-sized?) The entire story of this 90-minute feature involves a Bergen discovering the trolls and kidnapping most of them, leading the plucky Troll Princess Poppy (Anna Kendrick) to mount a rescue attempt. She recruits Branch (Justin Timberlake), the only sad Troll, to help her. It’s a real there-and-back-again, and would be over in 15 or 20 minutes flat were it not for the padding involving: simplistic emotional appeals, obvious lessons, an unlikely Bergen Cyrano/Cinderella-riffing romance, scattershot inanity, a variety of oddball road movie montages, and a whole host of jukebox covers. It’s colorful nothing.

The movie is a step back for DreamWorks, who have in the last several years pivoted away from a preponderance of snarky pop-culture saturated annoyances into some high-quality fantasy. From the relatively serious adventures – the How to Train Your Dragons – to slapstick silliness – Mr. Peabody & Sherman, Penguins of Madagascar – and those in between – the Kung Fu Pandas – the animation studio has been doing good work building worlds and experimenting in a variety of tones, styles, and moods. Here, though, we’re back with an overqualified and underutilized all-star cast (tiny voice roles for Zooey Deschanel, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Christine Baranski, Russell Brand, Gwen Stefani, John Cleese, James Corden, Jeffrey Tambor, Ron Funches, Kunal Nayyar, Quvenzhané Wallis…) who pop in as barely characterized background players in a grindingly obvious plot. Is there any doubt the sad troll will learn to be happy again by journeying with an irrepressible optimist and saving their joyful kind? The trip is dusted with wacky humor, random nonsense – glittery flatulence, slangy punchlines, awkward innuendoes – and hectic movement.

So there’s not much to it. This is the sort of short movie that feels very long. But it’s not entirely unpleasant. Directors Mike Mitchell and Walt Dohrn (SpongeBob SquarePants) play around with the look of the picture in some appealing ways. The CG is used not to create the usual vaguely plastic look of so many big studio animations, but instead makes a look approximating yarn, felt, and scraps from a craft store reject pile. This gives it a faux-handcrafted texture as it spins out odd forest creatures: spindly spiders, giant mouths, floating eyes, ginormous snakes, and a talking cloud with arms, legs, and sneakers. Did I mention it’s all a bit of a trip? This is a kids’ movie so formulaically developed on a plot and thematic level that the only thing the filmmakers could think to keep the adults’ attention is randomness. It’s not inherently funny when these characters sing pop songs or say things like “Oh snap,” or when a Julia Child-looking Bergen chef appears to be performed in a Carol Burnett voice impersonation. But it’s enough to make the parents in the audience chuckle from the sheer unexpectedness. It is what it is.

Derivative and hackneyed in the extreme, it doesn’t try too hard to build a world or develop characters. It’s simply a bright-hued cartoony cast of toys now available at a store near you. This fits a movie more interested in look and design than in emotional underpinnings. When we finally learn why Branch is so sad all the time – his grandmother died because of singing – it sounds like a joke, complete with a cutaway flashback. But it plays out on the characters’ tearful reactions like we’re supposed to take this sentiment seriously. The movie’s both too randomized and too routine to settle on any one satisfying storytelling approach. It’s all about whatever erratic nonsense it can joke around with while cobbling together the expected kids’ movie beats. At least it’s enjoyable to look at some of the time, and for all its frazzled mania is never as grating as The Secret Life of Pets or actively hateful as Angry Birds. You could do a lot worse for kids’ entertainment this year, is what I’m saying. And maybe on this dark pre-election weekend, an insubstantial movie about dance parties and positive thinking melting away seemingly intractable disagreements is just the silly distraction we need.

Stuck on the Runway: PLANES

I’ve never found the world of Pixar’s Cars movies to be all that difficult to believe. It’s Earth, but every living thing is a vehicle. Of course the level of realism is close to nonexistent, but you know what else isn’t real? Talking cars. There comes a point where you aren’t picking away at the plausibility of a fantasy world and you’re just simply resisting the premise. When people wonder, say, how cars managed to build a cathedral or why they’d need farms, well, there’s no good answer other than “they just do.” Those questions simply don’t bother me because the world of Cars and Cars 2 is nothing more than a moderately clever spin on ours that’s only use is as a backdrop for fast-paced sequences of comedy and excitement vividly brought to life through Pixar’s typically virtuosic attention to animated detail and terrific sound effects. That they aren’t deep Pixar doesn’t mean they aren’t enjoyable in their own right. They’re cartoony and operate within their own cracked world perfectly. I choose to believe in it because I find them fun enough to avoid nitpicky questions.

Planes, on the other hand, is the movie that people who don’t like the Cars movies think they are. It’s a junk heap of cliché and distractingly haphazard approach to keeping the fantasy world making some sort of consistent internal sense. If nothing else, I hope it’ll help some Cars haters realize that, at the very least, those movies aren’t this bad. Pixar has had bad buzz around their recent sequels and prequels, as if follow-ups are inherently uncreative. I don’t think that’s the case. Nor do I think that they’re forced to make movies they don’t want to make. Proof is Planes, which is a spinoff of the Cars movies that was punted to their corporate sibling Disney Animation to cook up as a direct-to-DVD release. For some reason this on-the-cheap piece of rote animated family filmmaking has been deemed worthy of the big screen. Maybe Disney had an opening on the schedule they needed filling or hoped that it could cushion the blow of the mega-budgeted The Lone Ranger should it flop. (It did, but don’t let that stop you from seeing it if you haven’t. It’s very good.)

Watching Planes had me questioning aspects of this universe I’d never contemplated before. It’s the story of a crop-duster (Dane Cook) who’d really like to be a racing plane. With the encouragement of a fuel truck (Brad Garrett), a forklift (Teri Hatcher), and a World War II (really) fighter plane (Stacy Keach), he enters an international globetrotting race filled with lazy cultural shorthand for contestants and destinations. The crop-duster is laughed at until he starts to make progress and win friends with his good heart. But isn’t this world one with a great deal of predetermination? If you’re born a crop-duster, don’t you have some mechanical limitations that could never be overcome? If you’re born a train, a popemobile, or a jumbo jet, isn’t your job pretty much set? Cars finds a racecar learning to enjoy life in the slow lane, while Cars 2 finds a tow truck mistaken for a secret agent. But neither advocates them doing things they’re just not built to do.

I realize it doesn’t make a good kid’s film moral to say that these vehicles are built to do certain jobs and should be happy with their lot in life, but isn’t that what’s happening here? To claim otherwise is to promote willful ignorance about the way life in car-land is built. This world has a pretty rigid caste system. Why else would a forklift (Sinbad) and the other racers (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, John Cleese, Priyanka Chopra, Cedric the Entertainer, Carlos Alazraqui, and Roger Craig Smith) relentlessly mock the crop-duster for his God-given technical specifications? So what happens when a vehicle goes into the shop? Is it major surgery to improve the engine block? How about getting outfitted with shiny new aerodynamic wings? Plastic surgery or performance enhancement? There’s a deeply strange moment when the crop-duster is worried about removing his sprayer to improve his speed.

If there had been anything distinctive or enjoyable about this movie I probably wouldn’t have been stuck contemplating the underlying philosophy and countless technical details of this fantasy world. I also found myself asking why this world even needs crops, let alone crop-dusters and, in the vehicular World War II, what type of car was Hitler? A shot of the New York City skyline had me briefly wonder what happened in this world on 9/11. I realize these aren’t questions the target audience is likely to be asking, but I had to do something to keep my mind active. It’s not often a studio approves its own cheap knockoff, but here one is anyways. The animation is vanilla, the plotting achingly predictable and painfully simple, and the moralizing cheap, sentimental, and tone-deaf. (The only mildly enjoyable touch is the casting of Anthony Edwards and Val Kilmer as Top Gun fighter jets.) Director Klay Hall and screenwriter Jeffrey M. Howard (responsible for three direct-to-DVD Tinkerbell movies between the two of them) have made a movie that’s nothing more than a timewaster, a space-filler, and, worst-case scenario, a babysitter. Kids deserve better than this lame hunk of junk. 

Stuffed with Fluff: WINNIE THE POOH

I don’t see how any lover of animation, and certainly any fan of Winnie the Pooh, could be disappointed in Winnie the Pooh, a lovingly hand-drawn animated feature that hews closely to the original tone and structure of the A.A. Milne picture books as filtered through the indelible visual design of the 1960’s Disney shorts based on them and compiled in the altogether wonderful 1977 feature The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. This new film collects the familiar characters in their familiar setting and allows them to behave in predictably mild and sweet ways. Perhaps the strangest and most notable thing about this feature, especially now in 2011, is how simple and unconcerned with posturing it is.

Directors Stephen J. Anderson and Don Hall (along with their small army of writers and animators) are decidedly uninterested in straining for artificial hipness. There is ease and comfortability with which the production slips into the simple, charming rhythms of a life with Pooh bear in the Hundred Acre Wood. Winnie the Pooh (Jim Cummings) just wants his honey – his tummy, after all, is awfully grumbly – and the crux of the film is finding ways to thwart that desire, to create situations that will pull the character into choices between finding honey and helping others. Sometimes, he will fail, and succumb to the visions of honey pots dancing in his head like a Busby Berkeley number, but eventually Pooh learns to put others first. At least until his tummy starts grumbling again.

Between Pooh and his honey is a collection of familiar characters with various immediate goals. The depressive donkey named Eeyore (Bud Luckey) loses his tail. The bouncy, flouncy Tigger (Jim Cummings, again) thinks he just might need a sidekick. Owl (Craig Ferguson, an unexpected choice) is writing his memoirs. Rabbit (Tom Kenny) is tending his garden. Kanga  (Kristen Anderson-Lopez) is knitting a scarf for Roo (Wyatt Dean Hall). Piglet (Travis Oates) is – oh, d-d-d-dear! – so nervous. These are characters that are cheerfully stationary in their personalities, which have a kind of warmhearted purity of spirit in their sweet simplicity. It’s nice to see them again because we know they will fall into predictable patterns. The voice work, an eclectic mix to be sure, is comforting in its way of seeming to fit the memory of what they sounded like in the past. There are differences in some of the interpretations but by and large they fit. After all, the voices are a just as predictable part of the characters as their personalities

But that’s not to say the film itself is overly predictable. Simplicity is the key here, not a kind of watery sameness or dumb homogenized energy, but a simple reverence for childhood and a true respect for a very young target audience. Their surrogate, the imaginative little British boy Christopher Robin (Jack Boulter), serves as a bridge between the “real world” and the world of these ambulatory animated stuffed animals. He is never explicitly shown to be the creator of this gentle fantasy. He’s a participant and, when absent, a recipient of reverence and respect from these creatures. There’s a playful storybook atmosphere that harkens back to Disney’s earlier efforts of adaptation.

Narrator John Cleese will break into banter with the imaginary characters, sometimes even shaking the book or finding his patience tried when the drawings collide or otherwise interact with the text on the page. There’s a love of reading, of wordplay, present in the film that helps to create an atmosphere of sweet sophistication. It may seem all a bit simple and distant to a jaded adult audience, but for kids I would imagine that the film has a wonderful sense of being pitched at exactly the right level, with just enough to engage the very young precisely where they are and even occasionally thrillingly just enough beyond where they are. It’s a refreshingly small feature, topping out at just over an hour, padded to feature length with a delightful post-credits scene, a syrupy pre-feature short, and sweet songs sung by Zooey Deschanel. Its modest scale makes it entirely perfect for what it is, a grand first theatrical experience for a small child while also serving as a small dose of nostalgia for those who love and cherish the everlasting reliability that these characters will remain exactly who they are for now and forever.