While taking a break from endless COVID-19 news stories, and hoping to have something new to talk about with my pre-school nieces and nephews, I watched the most recent DreamWorks Animation film, Trolls World Tour. After watching the ending credits, my first thought was how marvelously it illustrated the ideas of the “Philosopher of Freedom”—Sir Isaiah Berlin. It may surprise many to hear that a children’s animated movie about trolls could portray such far-reaching concepts as monism, pluralism, and negative and positive liberties.
You might also be thinking, “Matthew, you are seriously overthinking this movie.” I promised in the mission of this blog to not just discuss the ideas driving current events, but also to dive deeper into popular culture. Trolls World Tour certainly qualifies as pop culture. I hope you find this post a fun distraction from everything else going on in the world today and enjoy reading it as much as I had writing it. Also, be warned that there are spoilers about Trolls World Tour below. Reading this first may help you appreciate the movie a bit more while watching it, or spoil some of its joy, as I do give away some plot points.
To prove the connection I propose between the messages in Trolls World Tour and the ideas of Isaiah Berlin, let me first share with you the ancient understanding of the differences between foxes and hedgehogs. According to the Greek poet Archilochus “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Sir Isaiah Berlin took the poet’s insight and made it into the theme of his popular essay on Tolstoy, which he later expanded into a full book, called “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Berlin interpreted the quote to mean that foxes employ many strategies to hunt their prey and avoid enemies, while hedgehogs only know to roll up into a ball—quills out—when endangered. He then went on to develop a typology of people based on the different survival strategies adopted by foxes and hedgehogs. Some people, according to Berlin, are foxes who see the world as nuanced, complicated, even contradictory. Others are hedgehogs who see the world through the lens of a single set of values. In the jargon used by Berlin, foxes are pluralists, and hedgehogs are monists.
Artist: Arturo Espinoza Source: Wikipedia Commons
Incidentally, Sir Isaiah Berlin revealed his own “foxlike” personality in his Hedgehog and the Fox essay when he concluded that Tolstoy was a fox who tried very hard to be a hedgehog. Berlin, recognized in Tolstoy that both personality traits might exist in a single person, even though one may better explain one’s fundamental character than the other. The recognition of nuance makes Berlin fit neatly into the “fox” personality category.
How do foxes and hedgehogs relate to the latest Trolls movie?
Trolls World Tour focuses on two main characters, the pop music troll, aptly named Poppy, and the rock troll queen, Barb. In many ways, both share similarities. Poppy believed that pop music is the only music worth liking. She convinced herself that by the mere force of her personality, she could convince the other five troll tribes (Funk, Classical, Techno, Country, and Rock) to convert to her style of music and abandon theirs. Queen Barb’s agenda was to forcibly conquer the other music tribes to unite them all under her reign as Rockers. Essentially, Poppy and Barb share the same goal (uniting the genres) and only differ in their means of achieving it.
Following Poppy’s journey, we learn that in the distant past, the Pop trolls once tried to subjugate all the others by remixing them into pop music. As a result of the Pop trolls attempted takeover each of the six genres separated to form their own nation-states. Political scientists might say that the trolls became ethno-nationalist as a consequence of escaping the tyranny of the Pop trolls. In the language of Isaiah Berlin, every troll we encountered early on had hedgehog personalities. They only saw the world through the lens of their prospective music genre (monism). The specific music preference of each tribe formed the basis of their entire society.
As Poppy traveled and encountered trolls with very different tastes, she became disoriented. Encountering the country trolls jarred her sensibilities as she was baffled by the sad country ballads so alien to the happy pop music of her tribe. “Don’t they know songs are supposed to be happy?” she asked aloud. Her belief that the country trolls could be convinced of the error of their ways by a pop music medley—complete with a choreographed dance routine—failed miserably. Poppy’s failure taught her the lesson that not everyone shares her beliefs, and maybe that is okay. As Poppy followed her heroes’ journey across the lands of trolls, she learned to listen to others and became more accepting of other’s ways. One of her dear friends, Cooper, even turned out to be a long-lost prince from the Funk kingdom, and ultimately embraced his funk heritage and his adopted pop-music culture by identifying as Pop and Funk.
Soon after Queen Barb’s imperial plans of world domination succeeded, events quickly transpired, resulting in her victories leading to a disaster that nearly ended all of Troll-kind. Witnessing the catastrophic results of Queen Barb’s vision of ideological purity, Poppy saw the error of her ways and embraced diversity. Poppy saved the day when she persuaded Queen Barb to join her in encouraging every tribe to reclaim their musical heritage and perform in their preferred style. The harmony produced through the diversity of styles on display returned the magic that was previously lost by the internecine conflict. Returning to the ideas introduced by Isaiah Berlin, if he had lived to watch Trolls World Tour, he would likely describe it as a story of Trolls with hedgehog personalities, who slowly transform into trolls with fox personalities—and better off for it!
The analogy between music genres and ideologies is transparent and plays into Isaiah Berlin’s ideas about liberty. In “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Berlin famously argued that there are two forms of liberty—negative and positive. The short definition of negative liberty is that it is “liberty from,” while positive liberty is “liberty to.” To explain further, positive liberty concerns self-mastery and associated with having a say in the laws in which one is governed. In the words of Berlin, “I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind.” If Queen Barb’s actions were motivated by the desire to please her father—voiced by Ozzy Osbourne, and not from her true personal desires, then she is not truly free.
Negative liberty is the liberty that one has because one is not prevented from doing what one wishes. If Poppy wanted to sing a Lady Gaga song before undertaking her journey, there was no law or person to prevent her. Negative liberties are violated by external forces (like the government).
Classic liberalism is based on negative liberty and is the underlying principle behind the U.S. Constitution. Berlin seemed to believe that while the principle of negative liberty can be used to justify tyranny, it is a safer guiding principle than positive liberty. While there is nothing sinister about positive liberty, in and of itself, according to Berlin, it has a history of being distorted by totalitarian regimes.
In his view on the history of ideas, Isaiah Berlin identified Rousseau as the villain who opened the door for totalitarianism by introducing the concept of the “General Will.” According to Berlin, thinkers who incorporated Rousseau’s theories into their own also adopted the idea that freedom means the submersion of the individual will to that of the state. Berlin associated Rousseau’s romanticism with positive liberty and made a direct connection between Rousseau’s “General Will” and the totalitarian ideologies of Stalinism/Leninism and fascism. Given Berlin’s understanding of how positive liberties can be abused, one can easily see why Isaiah Berlin might be wary of ideologies promoting it.
Returning to Trolls World Tour, both Queen Poppy and Barb initially held a distorted positive view of liberty. Before Poppy became more cosmopolitan through her travels, she believed that ultimate freedom came from accepting only Pop music as the ultimate path to the good life. As for Barb, she initially thought that the world being under the sway of rock and roll would lead to true liberation.
What lessons should one take from Trolls World Tour? As an excellent introduction of the ideas of Sir Isaiah Berlin suitable for six-year-olds, one could not do worse. Adults and children can leave the movie appreciating the wisdom of the clever fox (or enlightened troll) who can see the value in a diversity of life approaches and ways of thinking. As the final musical number in Trolls World Tour showed, there is harmony in diversity.
Do you think I overanalyzed the movie? I would love to read your comments and thoughts about my take on Trolls World Tour.
