A Troll in Central Park

Yet another in the cheap-arse animation seats, Troll brings us little new and a lot of old. Made as recently as 1994 and containing some early excursions into digital 3D props, this still seems mired in a '70s style (both design and script).

A lot of animated films get made because the executives realise they can put together a film relatively cheaply and make their money back in video sales alone. I’m not saying this is the case here, but it certainly smacks of it, with real life reference models, photocopied cels and a limited cast of well-knowns.

Stanley is a troll living among the trolls in some sort of underworld similar to where the Chuds reportedly live, right under New York. They are ruled with an iron fist by Gnorga, Queen of the Trolls, who banishes Stanley to The World for being too nice and growing flowers everywhere with his green thumb.

He soon befriends two children in Rosie and Gus, although Gus is a hard-arsed and cynical six-year-old who disbelieves in stuff. He is soon won over though and they share adventures, until Gnorga gets peeved that Stanley’s having such a good time and decides to visit Central Park (where Stanley ended up) and finish him off. Naturally, a climax ensues.

As noted, there’s nothing really new here and I suspect this film was a shameless attempt to cash in on that stupid troll fad that was about at the time. Produced in Don Bluth’s Ireland and California studios, the film lacks any real impact and in fact struck me as almost too cartoon, following an old school of animation where characters laughing ‘hoo hoo’ fashion was terribly clever. Although some attempt at modernity has been introduced with some of the digital concepts and they’ve been handled well, they seem a little tacked on to the overall story and wholly unnecessary. Perhaps executed as a stilted shot-in-the-eye to the Animation Overlords at that well-known Californian theme park... who knows?

While the kids might enjoy it, this might have trouble grabbing adults. The child and troll characters are nicely cartoony, but the rest are rotoscoped by the look of things. (Rotoscoping is a technique by which live action can be captured and readily converted to animation). The film is hand-drawn character artwork photocopied onto clear acetate cels and hand-painted in the old-school style (yet up until recently, some television still utilised this method) and does look mostly okay. However, it suffers some cruel fates we animators are familiar with which I shall speak of now...

The constant and enduring nemesis with hand-painted cels is crap adhering to the static-rich plastic. Here the film has suffered terribly at the hands of positive ions with fibres, dust and assorted junk stuck to the stock like shit to a blanket. And this is heavy throughout the piece. No doubt kids won’t notice this, just as they won’t notice the camera reflection on some darker shots. However, when scrutinising DVD under the proverbial microscope as we do here, these things are impossible to miss.

While the animation is fine and very colourful, that curious blend noted above between realistic and cartoony is off-putting and throws the story into a storytelling limbo. It could be argued that the kids’ vision is metaphorically unimpeded by the reality of the adult world, but in a film aimed at this age bracket, I shouldn’t think there has been so much thought put into such an ideal.

However, the colours are fabulous, the animation quite nice and well achieved with perfect vision throughout, regardless of light or dark. And it’s all been presented in the 4:3 ratio with some very pretty artwork that littl’uns will certainly enjoy.

When the opening titles reveal vast lists of names credited with writing original songs for the production, I kinda wither a little. I think I counted five songs in all with a reprise at the end, plus some bouts of classical tracks thrown in. Robert Folk created the score for this, as well as penning a couple of the songs, but none of it is too outstanding. The temptation to fast forward through some of the sappier songs was great, but I took a bullet for you guys here and sat through them.

We receive the soundtrack here in Dolby Digital stereo, which is more than adequate for the purposes of the film. Prologic processing delivers some minor moments among the centre speakers and woofer but, again, there’s nothing to get worked up over. Dialogue is all nicely spoken and easily understood, which is always helpful for the youngsters.

Another Fox cheapy gives us but the film and that’s all folks.

Falling a little short of classic, this film runs for but 72 minutes, which is around the attention span of most kids filmwise and most animator reviewers. Any longer and this would have been insufferable, but thankfully they walked off stage rather than be carried off. Performances border on irritating from Dom Deluise in the title role, to overblown by Cloris Leechman as Gnorga. However, she is way preferable to Deluise here.

Strictly for the kids, this one, with little to hold an adult’s attention, and no extras to add to the limited basis of this DVD 5 disc. I’d recommend renting it for the kids first, as I’m not sure how often they’d care to rewatch it.