Post Magazine

November 2016

Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/749700

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 34 of 51

www.postmagazine.com 33 POST NOVEMBER 2016 Cronkhite says. "We used hair as a base for everything. Their world is monochromatic, but their hair is brightly colored. They make their houses out of their hair. They use their hair as trampolines. They have zip lines made of hair." Perhaps hearkening back to the first troll doll, Cronkhite began to con- sider giving her CG trolls a handmade texture. "For a time, our trolls were going to be naked like the dolls, but I didn't think we should treat our trolls as humans with skin," she says. "So, I thought about giving them a Muppet quality. I remembered that Thomas Dam gave his first troll woolen cloth- ing. All those thoughts were swirling. The word 'handmade' came into my mind. I thought, 'What if they're felted?' I remember the moment I said it out loud. I was with our head of modeling. Then Tim [Lamb] said their interiors should be translucent, like a gummy bear. Then we went for more woolen hair." Lamb adds, "And I said, 'Why stop there?' " Then Cronkhite said, "What if we fiber-art the entire trolls forest?" "And that's what happened," Cronkhite says. "Initially, it was expen- sive to make a fuzzy world because no one knew how. But the crew figured it out." And thus, when Poppy travels to Bergen, she dances through an environment unlike anything seen in a CG-animated feature. "We could have had our 'beauty' go into a scary forest on an arduous jour- ney, but we decided not to do that," Cronkhite says. "That wasn't our movie. So we flocked the forest and made it more colorful and crazy with creatures Tim designed. Poppy is out of her ele- ment, but it isn't dark and creepy." Poppy is pink from head to toe, with a blue felt dress and a green headband that has blue felt flow- ers. Her father, King Peppy (Jeffrey Tambor) is orange with fuchsia and gray hair and mustache, green felt pants and an aqua felt vest. Other trolls are as colorful. DJ Suki (Gwen Stefani), for example, is deep pink with orange hair and an aqua nose. Creek (Russell Brand) is purple with yellow felt pants and blue and green hair. Pieces of felt even help tell the sto- ry directly. Poppy makes scrapbooks from pieces of felt, and the animated scrapbook pages provide a narrative. NOT SO HAPPY Bergen, however, is another story. The characters are human-sized, big enough to eat a troll, and round enough for us to believe they have good appetites. Some time earlier, be- fore Poppy's father had given leader- ship of the trolls to his daughter, King Peppy had helped the trolls escape Bergen, and the Bergens have been unhappy since. In fact, the Bergen king tells his son that he'll never be happy. "But we want them to achieve hap- piness," Dohrn says. "Especially me," adds Mitchell. Bergen King Gristle (John Cleese) is avocado green and wears a brown suede-looking suit and a robe with a fur collar. His rotund son, Prince Gristle (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), is a lighter shade of avocado. The King's chef (Christine Baranski) is purple, has a very long face and is determined to capture the trolls again. The only character in Bergen with a touch of pink is a wide-eyed, pigeon-toed scullery maid named Bridget (Zooey Deschanel). She's light purple, but she wears a pink dress and shoes, The CG Trolls were given a felt texture. Their hair is both unusual and useful. Poppy's pink color reflects her positive persona.

Articles in this issue

Links on this page

Archives of this issue

view archives of Post Magazine - November 2016