So I finally got around to watching K-Pop Demon Hunters. Unfortunately for me this wasn’t a movie that I could afford to just put off for a while. As someone who actively listens to a lot of pop music, and especially so K-Pop and J-Pop, as their songs have charted in popularity over the weekend, I wasn’t able listen to those playlists on Spotify, unless I wanted to dodge the songs - since I wasn’t willing to listen to them without watching the film.

So this was essentially inevitable.

Upon putting the movie on, I was immediately greeted by an interesting surprise. It was animated by Sony Pictures Animation Imageworks, which is the same studio that did the Spider-Verse movies and The Mitchells vs the Machines. This was a delightful surprise right off the bat. As the movie went on it was clear the studio has really evolved over the years.

It’s not the same style as the Spider-verse movies, but I could clearly see a lot of the same mannerisms and facial expressions from TMvTM. I think my favorite little detail is the hat on the Magpie.

The songs throughout were as to be expected, phenomenal. I ended up reading through the Wikipedia page, since I was curious about if they got singers to be the voices of the characters, but apparently not, they instead did the thing where you have different VAs for singing and for Acting. This is a nice compromise, and one that was probably necessary, when you have a movie like this where every song almost essentially needs to be a hit, the number of top song-writers you need to hire to churn out all of them must be a nightmare to manage. They DO manage it though, the songs are great and very catchy, I’m excited to look into the Your Idol song the boyband preformed (probably tomorrow while at work).

The story was pretty solid. For a movie that is essentially one long music video, it’s hard to interweave a really good story between all the songs, even if you can manage a level of exposition within the songs themselves. But I think my biggest gripe with the story is the resolution of the story.

In my mind it felt like they took the path of maintaining the status quo. They let the barrier fall and had a chance to work towards a new method of resolving the situation more permanently. But instead we just got them reforming the barrier essentially how it was while paying lip-service to accepting oneself. Which is fine, but it’s such a boring and common wrap-up.

They had the perfect elements to flip the tables and build redemption into the story for not just the main antagonist boy, but also for all the demons trapped on the other side. They could have stolen back the demons into the human world, absolving them of their sins (if that’s what was the cause of their transformations) and starving the big-bad of the film of the power to do anything. Rebuilding a better path of acceptance of even those who make mistakes or are scared to show themselves for fear of what others may think of them.

All in all it was a great movie. I wonder if we’ll get any more. I still have my Jentry Chau vinyl and am still regularly listening to those songs so I suspect these may similarly stick around.

Another break-out song that hit me today was Hello by Furui Riho, which debuted yesterday in the first episode of City The Animation by Kyoani.

That’s all, we’ll see if I do more reviews…