Trolls Band Together                      3 ½ stars

Just out in theaters is DreamWorks’s third installment of the colorful candy-tone animated Trolls series based on the popular children’s toy of the sixties. This time it is Trolls Band Together with gray-toned Branch (the legendary Justin Timberlake) and pink Poppy (Anna Kendrick of the Pitch Perfect movies) returning for another popular tune filled adventure that will appeal to the kids and to adults alike. As the film opens we get Branch’s origin story finding out that he has four brothers that were part of a popular boy band called BroZone years before. (The opening performance contains obvious references to NSYNC and other boy bands of the early 2,000’s era. At one point one of the brothers says “We’ve gone from boys to men, and now there’s only one direction for us to go: the backstreets.”) Branch was in diapers at that time and was referred to as Baby B. Older brothers Floyd (Troye Sivan), John Dory (Eris André), Spruce (Daveed Diggs) and Clay (Kid Cudi) have all gone their separate ways, but John Dory has returned to seek Branch’s help on a desperate mission. It seems that the pop-star duo, Velvet and Veneer, (Amy Schumer and Andrew Rannells) have been holding brother Floyd prisoner. These two stringy characters have no musical talent of their own, but they have engineered a way to extract the musical gift from the troll and use it themselves, enabling their star status at Mount Rageous. But if the trolls can “band together”, and create “perfect family harmony”, they will be able to free poor Floyd from imminent doom! Poppy insists that Branch must get the family together to rescue his brother. So much for the setup. Beyond that, there are harmonious tunes galore as we take a ride through various boy band songs and medleys of music from the seventies and eighties. It’s all done on the background of some very crafty and colorful animation with the smooth textures and troll hair we have seen in the earlier Trolls movies. And of course, there is the eternal message of togetherness and how brothers will always have one another’s backs. This may not be the best of the Trolls movies but for pure animated fluff, it may be worth an hour and a half of your time.