Animated musical ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ delivers on its title’s promise

The trio’s best protection against these villains is the Honmoon, a temporary blue energy shield cast over the world, and maintained—quite conveniently—by creating catchy music for their fans. Making this magical seal permanent, or casting a “Golden Honmoon,” will seal away the demon world for good, and the technique seems to rest on the girl group dropping the perfect earworm single. However, when a rival boy band pops up from the demon realm, Huntrix is forced to confront questions (often more symbolic than literal) of the secretive pressures of the K-pop idol lifestyle, and of whether the trio’s blade-wielding, musically inspired battles are as morally binary as they believe.

Taking after fellow Sony Pictures Animation film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (and its bloated sequel, Across the Spider-Verse), KPop Demon Hunters animates “on twos,” a technique from hand-drawn animation that carries over remarkably to the all-CGI project, imbuing the characters with weight, and the frame with a jittery sense of reality. Like the Spider-Verse movies—which took inspiration from comics and western cartoons—this M.O. is spiritually aligned with the movie’s hybrid form, as a cross between American-standard computer renderings and classic hand-drawn Japanese styles, rife with the enrapturing action lines and hilariously exaggerated expressions typical of popular anime.

With Mira’s flowing, fiery mane Rumi’s lengthy purple plait and Zoey’s navy blue knot, each member of Huntrix has a signature look.

Courtesy of Netflix

It's an all-ages movie, so the colors pop, and the girls and their weapons are easy to identify, from Rumi’s lengthy purple plait and broadsword, to Zoey’s navy blue knots and ninja kunai, to Mira’s flowing, fiery mane and bladed staff. What makes their fight scenes against the cartoonish demons especially fun is that the action is inseparable from the movie’s musical sensibilities, as each battle takes the form of a music video.

The story is similarly broad and easy enough for kids to understand, albeit with plenty of adolescent humor once the girls are taken with the hunky demon boy band’s human forms. This rival group, the Saja Boys, are slavishly devoted to an abstract demon flame, Gwi-Ma (Byung-hun Lee), an easily digestible depression metaphor that preys on people’s dwindling self-worth. However, group leader Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop), who’s revealed to have a bittersweet backstory, has his own plans for the band’s success, which eventually involves Rumi once he learns a hidden secret about her lineage.

From left, Jinu (Ahn Hyo-Seop) and Rumi (Arden Cho).

Courtesy of Netflix

Rumi and Jinu share a pleasant enough dynamic, and while their romantic entanglements often feel on autopilot, the duo’s secretive tryst speaks to the ways in which K-pop stars are often forced to keep private love lives a secret to maintain their public image. This is just one of many hints at the harsh realities of the idol lifestyle, whose tenets are translated through fantasy tropes and symbols (including the demons bearing “shameful” physical marks referenced as though they were self-harm scars). Kpop Demon Hunters is incredibly on-the-nose with its double entendres, to the point that they subsume the more literal elements of the story.

However, the movie is so on-point with its sincere K-pop send-ups—in a combination of English and Korean—that the music ends up superseding even the jankiest story elements. The Saja Boys’ fluffy, romantic track comparing female listeners to cans of soda pop is a shoulder-shaker, while Huntrix’s power anthems and reflective ballads are hard not to hum along to. Even the songs that don’t exist as singles in the movie’s musical world—like a brief duet between Rumi and Jinu—add enough emotional flavor to the proceedings that any narrative and thematic gaps feel firmly papered over. The film never reaches the emotional highs of its Spider-Verse siblings, but it makes for a unique and occasionally dazzling blend of global pop culture and Korean mythology, resulting in pure audio-visual pleasure.

The Saja Boys aren't just a K-pop boy band, they're a demon boy band.

Courtesy of Netflix