For the Fate of the World

Anyone that has read this site for a while, or listened to the podcast, likely remembers that I am not a huge fan of musicals. Animated or otherwise, musical storytelling is not my thing. By and large musicals tend to break a few rules of visual storytelling that I can’t stand, most specifically using a five minute song when fifteen seconds of dialogue would be appropriate for the same scene. Musicals stretch out storytelling and, in my head, waste time when we could be pushing the story forward. And all the times the characters have to sing out about their feelings when we could already tell what they were feeling because, you know, they’re acting… it just bothers me.

Still, there is the occasional musical that I can actually stand, some animated and some not. I like Chicago, in large part because the musical sequences there do a lot of heavy lifting to push the story forward and aren’t just padding. For some reason I actually enjoy Moulin Rouge even though the opening act is pretty hard to sit through. And on the animated side of the equation, I certainly would have to add South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut alongside some more traditional family favorites like Aladdin and The Lion King.

We can now add another musical onto the list that gets my seal of approval. The recent release of KPop Demon Hunters grabbed my wife’s attention, and she finally cajoled me into getting a NetflixOriginally started as a disc-by-mail service, Netflix has grown to be one of the largest media companies in the world (and one of the most valued internet companies as well). With a constant slate of new internet streaming-based programming that updates all the time, Netflix has redefined what it means to watch TV and films (as well as how to do it). subscription again (which means I’ll have it for a month or so, watch everything I want, and then cancel it for another year) just so we could watch the animated film. And, yes, it was pretty good. It’s bright, it’s colorful, it has fun dialogue and pretty solid artwork. Most importantly it has music that accents the film instead of detracting from it. So if all you want to know is if the film is watchable, yes it is. It’s a very fun, breezy, animated film.

The movie focuses on three characters: lead singer Rumi (voice actress Arden Cho, singing voice performed by Ejae), singer and dance choreographer Mira (voice May Hong, singing Audrey Nuna), and rapper and lyricist Zoey (voice Ji-young Yoo, singing Rei Ami). Together these three form Huntr/x, a KPop group that has taken the world by storm. They’re on the eve of their greatest accomplishment, the release of their biggest single yet, “Golden”, and then they can truly rest and relax.

Oh, and they’re also demon hunters and their time spent as Huntr/x is all so they can strengthen the music that powers the Honmoon, a shield that protects the world from demons, sealing them away in a demon dimension. “Golden” would create a Golden Honmoon, permanently keeping the demons out once and for all. Understandably the king of the demon, Gwi-Ma (Lee Byung-hun), does not want this to happen. His demons send him souls, which feed and power him and without access to human souls the land of the demons would wither and die. But Gwi-Ma has a plan, given to him by a musical demon named Jinu (voice Ahn Hyo-seop, singing Andrew Choi), who would go topside to create a new, demon-powered boy band, the Saja Boys, so they could pull attention from Huntr/x and weaken the Honmoon. The ladies have to be ready because these demons have moves… but for fighting and on the dance floor.

KPop Demon Hunters gets a lot of mileage out of its premise. Because these ladies are KPop idols, naturally they’d sing and perform their music regularly. Their music is based on their world, their emotions, their lives, so when they sing and dance it’s also informing us about the characters. They can sing about the Honmoon, about fighting demons, about being a half-demon that is hiding it from the rest of her fans, and we get to understand them better while the music is pushing the story forward. It’s not a cheat, per se, but it is a shortcut the film takes to have both music and story going at the same time.

Oh yeah, and one of the girls is a half-demon. Rumi is, effectively, the lead of the film. The story is really about her and how, although her mother was a previous demon hunter who also worked to strengthen the Honmoon, her father was a demon. She’s kept this fact from her friends for years, at the behest of her demon hunting master, Celine (voice Yunjin Kim, singing Lea Salonga), trusting that once the Honmoon turned golden, her demonic traits and markings would be sealed away as well. It has, of course, been eating away at her ever since.

This sets up the main conflict of the film, whether Rumiz can embrace her secret and let her friends in or if, somehow, Jinu can use this as a weakness to tear Huntr/x apart. It lends a lot of depth to Rumi and makes her an interesting character that we want to follow. She puts forth a perfect front, but behind the scenes she’s scared and flawed and doesn’t know what to do. This certainly makes her more relatable to the audience since, without the flaws and doubts she’s a superpowerful demon hunter with an incredible singing voice who’s also, likely, a multi-millionaire (if not a billionaire). Anything that makes her feel more real, that gives us something to connect to, helps us a lot.

Jinu also gets some fleshing out, going from main antagonist to something of an anti-hero as the film plays out. He’s flawed, too, of course since he’s also a demon. But we learn over time that he became a demon when he sold his soul to Gwi-Ma for the promise of riches and comfort. Getting to the heart of his story, and seeing how it affects him even now, is part of his growth path, and much of that comes out because he and Rumi interact and start to help each other find themselves. It’s a good back and forth between the leads that gives the film its heart.

The downside for the film is that the other characters don’t get quite as much fleshing out by comparison. Mira and Zoey are great characters, at least when it comes to their performances, but the film doesn’t devote nearly as much time to their stories as it does for Rumi and Jinu. We know that they each have tragic moments in their past that weigh on them, mostly because tiny moments come out before the end of the film to fill us in a little, but I would have liked to have even more. Sure, this film is mostly about Rumi, but a bit more time spent with the other girls would help make them feel like more than background characters in their movie.

Still, they get it better than the rest of the Saja Boys. The boy band is made up of five demon dudes, but only Jinu gets anything in the way of actual character traits. The rest of the team is made up of Romance Saja (Joel Kim Booster voice, Samuil Lee singing), Mystery Saja (Alan Lee voice, Kevin Woo singing), Abs Saja (SungWon Cho voice, Neckwav singing), and Baby Saja (Danny Chung singing), but we learn nothing about them. For most of the film I thought they were shadows of Jinu, controlled by him so he could create perfect five-part harmonies, except a sequence late in the film shows they are their own demons doing their own thing, but we never get anything from them. I don’t need a lot of character, to be fair, but even the fact that I couldn’t if they were different people or just puppets of Jinu shows how underdeveloped they are as characters.

I don’t think these moments are deal breakers. I totally understand why certain characters are prioritized over others for the sake of pushing the story forward. The film is a tight 100 minutes and putting in too much development elsewhere could have made it too long for the pre-teen demographic that I’m sure a film like this is designed to court. Cute, demon-hunting girls go up against sexy boys that can sing for the sake of the world, and it’s all done in very bright, often quite pink, colors. It’s not a stretch to say this is a film courting the female demographic of a certain young age, and as such some stuff is engineered in the final product to put the focus where it resounds the most: on a girl, fighting her inner demons, thinking that she’s a freak and her friends will reject her. It would resound with that demo, make no mistake, and I can appreciate how it does much of its work. I just wish I had slightly more with the other characters, just a bit, just to make them feel more real.

With that said, much of the movie does slap. The artwork is gorgeous, cranked out by Sony Pictures Animation in a style very similar to Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse, and the studio once again made a winner here. It’s coupled with music that is honestly pretty great. There’s a number of numbers in here that bop, ear worms that are hard to shake. My wife already has the soundtrack pre-ordered, and I’m sure many other fans of the film likewise are awaiting their copies. This film has a lot going right for it that a few flaws don’t really ruin the overall experience.

And hell, as far as fleshing out the story for the other characters, we could get that in a sequel and I’ll shut up at that point. There’s plenty of room for sequels, prequels, and more in this universe. Further adventures of Huntr/x are just the start as we could also get a story set when the girls were younger and still training to be hunters. We could get something set back with Rumi’s mom and her singing group a couple of decades prior. Hell, the film clearly establishes that these demon-hunting trios have existed in every major decade, so there’s a ton of these groups we could follow as they work to save the world. And if those films are like this one, I’m sure they’ll do really well also.

KPop Demon Hunters isn’t a film I expected to enjoy. Sure, you can lure me in with good artwork and demons, but it is a movie musical and I generally reject those. But this is the kind of film where I’m glad I have my policy that I’ll watch anything once because while I’m not sure if I’d watch this again (I didn’t love it as much as my wife did, and she really loved it), I am very glad I saw it. The movie is a lot of fun.