How Music Played A Critical Role In Trolls World Tour - Exclusive

Trolls World Tour isn't like the first Trolls movie. This time, the music takes center stage. Sure, Trolls had its fair share of toe-tapping musical numbers, but Trolls World Tour ups its game by making music key to the movie's plot. In the film, Poppy (Anna Kendrick) and Branch (Justin Timberlake) must travel across the six different Troll kingdoms — each of which represents a different musical genre — in order to save them from Barb (Rachel Bloom), the Troll queen of rock and roll.

It's a bigger adventure than the one featured in Trolls, which director Walt Dohrn says is by design. "That's what got us excited when we had the opportunity to make another one," Dohrn says during an exclusive talk with Looper. "We all felt like, 'Man, we just scratched the surface on this. There could be such a vast world here that we haven't even seen.'"

Basing the larger Trolls universe on music seemed like an obvious choice. Not only were the musical interludes some of Trolls' most memorable moments, but animation and music also go hand-in-hand. "I'm a huge fan of Fantasia," Dohrn reveals, invoking Walt Disney's iconic animated film. "There are also those great films of the '40s. There are Disney packaged films, like Make Mine Music, Melody Time, The Three Caballeros. I love them."

Like music, Dohrn explains, animation is all about timing, making the two natural partners. Not that it was easy to decide which types of music each of the Troll kingdoms would embody, of course. Dorhn knew that they needed to focus on six different genres — Trolls World Tour's villain plans to unify the world by playing the ultimate power chord, and guitars have six strings — but coming up with the final list proved tricky. "We can only have so much music in the film," Dohrn admits.

Early in production, Dohrn and the rest of the Trolls World Tour team consulted with a musicologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We talked to her a lot about how one genre led to another," he says. "We talked a little bit about cultural appropriation, which is in the film, versus inspiration, because one genre will be inspired by one and grow out of another."

That helped the Trolls World Tour crew come up with six types of music that — hopefully — covered the widest base possible. "We felt like the six main genres were a representation of music around the world," Dohrn says. "I feel like a lot of sub-genres shoot off of those six main genres." (Hip-hop is in the film, for example, but it's performed by a member of the Funk Kingdom.)

Genres that are less easy to classify made it into Trolls World Tour by way of some comedic bounty hunters. "In the end, it's a film about diversity, so we wanted as much representation as we could get," the director notes. "So, we started squeezing in some other genres, like K-pop and reggaeton and smooth jazz and yodeling." 

The end result is a smorgasbord of different musical genres. You may not enjoy all of Trolls World Tour's music, but odds are, there's going to be something in there that you like.