Many moons ago, we reported that DreamWorks Animation was moving towards making a movie called Trolls, based on those wispy-haired naked dolls that were so popular into the 90s. Although we have begged them not to do it, the studio has gone ahead with the idea, setting up Mike Mitchell (Shrek Forever After) as director. Now, they’ve added Anna Kendrick to the project, which means that it will probably actually happen.
Kendrick will lead the film as a “relentlessly upbeat” princess named Poppy; something which I’m sure will not get annoying after the first ten minutes. She will also get to exercise her voice in musical form, in what director Mitchell is describing as an “exact mix of spirit, sass and song that will no doubt give a whole new life to the iconic Troll dolls.”
New life indeed. Troll dolls have existed since 1959 and went through several fad phases in the 1970s and the 1990s. There have been TV show and video game spinoffs, but they pretty much seemed to go out of vogue as the millennium came around. There was a brief attempt at a TV show called Trollz in 2005, but that unsurprisingly did not go anywhere. Now DreamWorks is trying to resurrect the strange little creatures, though we presume that they will wear clothes this time around.
As for Anna Kendrick, she’s usually an enjoyable actress. She just wrapped Disney’s Into The Woods, and will be appearing in Pitch Perfect 2, so she’s definitely gravitating towards musicals right now. Maybe Mitchell is right though, and Kendrick will provide some “sass and song” for Trolls. Then again, maybe this will be the most embarrassing thing she’s ever done and she’ll regret it to her dying day; it’s really a toss-up.
Trolls is scheduled to come to theaters on November 4, 2016, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Published: Jun 17, 2014 12:15 pm