ALONG COMES MARY

Growing up, I was absolutely obsessed with Trolls. I think most 90s kids will tell you they had at-least a small collection of those “ugly but cute” dolls that were revamped with the colorful, crazy hair and a far cry from their humble Danish beginnings as a “Dam” doll in the 1960’s.

Now, get ready for another generation to fall in-love with Trolls! 20th Century Fox and DreamWorks Animation is proud to announce and unveil their first trailer for the highly anticipated feature film, TROLLS, arriving to theatres November 4th. Just in time for the holidays!

I was beyond thrilled when I was invited to head out to the DreamWorks Campus in LA to interview the Director of Trolls, Mike Mitchell, Co-Director Walt Dohrn, Producer Gina Shay (the creative team also responsible for Shrek!) and the stars of Trolls, Justin Timberlake and Anna Kendrick.

Kendrick plays perky Troll, Poppy, to Timberlake’s grumpy boots, voice of reason, Branch. As you can see in this brand new trailer, they definitely are “opposites attract” when it comes to their friendship….

I have had the pleasure of speaking to celebrities before, yet, I found myself very nervous at the thought of speaking to Timberlake. In my opinion, he is the Elvis Presley or Michael Jackson of our generation. With a musical catalog spanning nearly 20 years, he has manged to make the leap over to film with flying colors.

Anna Kendrick has been on my radar since I first loved her in 2009’s Up in the Air. A “triple threat”, Kendrick has managed to get an Academy Award and Tony nomination under her belt all before she was 25 years old.

I was intrigued to learn that Timberlake also serves at the Executive Music Producer for Trolls, and I was interested to ask him how the process of adding such beloved songs and great music to a film goes down; if you begin researching songs and have an idea of the story before the film is at all created, and such?? He was so gracious and offered me a quite lengthy response:

“This is my first time to do it on this level. I’ve never sort of been a music producer for a film.  Now, I came on a little after some of the songs were sought after and cleared, and I don’t  know if you know about the clearance process, but that can be, like, mind-numbing. So, I think that once these songs were cleared and I kind of came in, True Colors was definitely already picked out for this moment in the movie.

So, my job for that was hopefully to put our own spin on it, make it sound unique, make it sound like it belonged in the scene, much like a musical theater, musical theater almost.
So, then I wrote four original songs, one of them that you may or may not have heard, which is in the movie as well, and specifically written for the movie. I’ve never done anything like that as well.”

Trolls is sure to be a ht this Fall. I cannot wait to report back with more exciting announcements as they come, and, in the meantime, follow along to the countdown for TROLLS here!  xo

(*Disclosure: I was invited to attend the Trolls press conference on behalf of this blog. All opinions are my own and it was a highlight of my blogging career to interview this phenomenal creative team!)