Goddammit, KPop Demon Hunters is actually kind of good.

I finally gave in and watched KPop Demon Hunters.

I’ve known about this movie for a while now. How could I not? The damn thing is practically everywhere. It came out more than a year ago, and somehow I’m still seeing KPop Demon Hunters toys, shirts, videos, memes, music, and whatever other merchandise Netflix can slap these characters on. I managed to ignore most of it until a recent trip to Dave & Buster’s at Franklin Mills Mall (or Philadelphia Mills, or whatever the hell they’re calling it these days aside from dead).

Everywhere I looked, there was KPop Demon Hunters shit.

At that point I figured the universe was trying to tell me something. Fine. I give up. I’ll watch the stupid K-pop demon movie and see what everyone has been losing their minds over for the past year.

KPop Demon Hunters follows Rumi, Mira, and Zoey, the members of a massively popular K-pop group called HUNTR/X who secretly spend their free time fighting demons. Their music helps maintain a magical barrier known as the Honmoon, which keeps demons from crossing into the human world and stealing people’s souls. The demon king Gwi-Ma responds by sending a group of demons to Earth disguised as a rival K-pop group called the Saja Boys, whose job is to steal HUNTR/X’s fans and weaken the barrier. Complicating things further is the fact that Rumi is secretly half-demon herself and has spent most of her life hiding it from everyone around her. From there you get supernatural fights, K-pop performances, a little romance, plenty of comedy, and a whole lot of extremely marketable characters.

Now, I put this movie on knowing exactly what I was getting into. This is a movie aimed primarily at young teenagers and fans of K-pop (so basically young teenagers). I’m almost 40 years old and definitely not the target audience here. I don’t hate K-pop or have anything against it, but it’s also not something I go out of my way to listen to. If Spotify suddenly removed every K-pop song from existence tomorrow morning, I probably wouldn’t notice.

Because of that, I wasn’t expecting much from KPop Demon Hunters. I figured I’d watch it, roll my eyes a bunch of times, maybe get an article out of it, and then move on with my life.

I’d by lying if I didn’t say that I actually kind of enjoyed it.

I totally understand why this thing became as popular as it did. It’s nothing groundbreaking from a storytelling perspective, but it knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be and does it pretty well. The characters are likable, the story moves along at a good pace, the action is entertaining, and it doesn’t drag itself out trying to be something deeper than necessary. Most importantly, it never bored me, which is more than I can say for a surprising amount of modern entertainment. It felt kind of like watching a less serious Demon Slayer.

The music was also a lot better than I expected.

I’m not about to start blasting HUNTR/X while I’m lifting weights in my garage or anything. There are limits to how far I’m willing to take this shit. But some of the songs are legitimately catchy, and I could absolutely see myself putting on “Takedown” or “Soda Pop” while I’m sitting in my computer room, provided my girlfriend isn’t home to bust my balls over it, then tell everyone else at our workplace so they can bust my balls too.

The animation might have been the most interesting part for me. I don’t know what the proper technical terminology is for everything they were doing, but visually it looks like somebody threw stylized 3D animation, anime, and some of that rounded CalArts-looking stuff into a blender.

If you’ve been following this site for a while, you probably already know how I feel about the CalArts style. I think it looks like shit. That rounded, overly simplified style infected western animation for years and made half the shows coming out look like they were designed by the same five people. I’m sure somebody is already preparing a comment explaining to me why “CalArts style” isn’t technically the correct term, and I promise you I don’t care.

Interestingly enough, though, I didn’t mind it much here.

Combined with the 3D animation and the anime influence, those exaggerated facial expressions and character movements actually work. The movie can shift from a fairly normal-looking character to some ridiculous cartoon expression and then immediately into a flashy anime-style fight without any of it looking completely out of place. I know KPop Demon Hunters didn’t invent this kind of hybrid animation, but this was my first time sitting down and watching an entire movie done this way. It was interesting enough that I spent a decent amount of the movie paying attention to the animation itself.

I saw somebody on Reddit compare KPop Demon Hunters to 1990s Nickelodeon, which I think is overselling it quite a bit.

This is definitely better than a lot of the mindless crap companies like Disney have been pumping out for kids lately. It has personality, it has memorable characters, and it doesn’t feel like it was created by a corporate committee checking boxes on a spreadsheet. But putting it on the same level as 90s Nickelodeon? Come on now. We’re talking about Rugrats, Rocko’s Modern Life, Hey Arnold!, and the original era of SpongeBob SquarePants. That was Nickelodeon in its prime.

Granted, I grew up in the 90s, so I’m obviously biased as hell here.

KPop Demon Hunters is good. Classic Nickelodeon was something else entirely.

While I was watching the movie, the comparison that kept popping into my head was actually Demon Slayer. I originally described KPop Demon Hunters as a less serious Demon Slayer, and while I still think there’s something to that comparison, it admittedly oversimplifies both stories. One is a Japanese anime about people traveling around Taisho-era Japan cutting demons’ heads off with magic swords, while the other is a brightly colored musical about Korean pop stars fighting demons between concerts.

Obviously they’re not exactly the same thing.

There are some pretty noticeable similarities, though. Both stories revolve around organizations of specialized demon hunters whose responsibility has been passed down across generations. The demons prey upon humans, the heroes fight them with specialized weapons and supernatural abilities, and the battles are presented with a lot more visual flair than two people simply swinging swords at each other. There’s also an established mythology surrounding why the demons exist, how the hunters stop them, and what separates humans from demons in the first place.

Rumi creates another pretty significant parallel. Her being half-demon means she’s caught between the two worlds while simultaneously being expected to destroy one side of herself. That obviously isn’t Tanjiro’s exact situation, but it hits some of the same themes as his relationship with Nezuko and his gradual realization that demons aren’t necessarily mindless monsters. Both stories spend time asking whether becoming a demon automatically makes someone evil or whether there’s still some humanity buried underneath.

Jinu fits into that comparison too. Like some of the better demons in Demon Slayer, he isn’t just an evil monster who woke up one morning and decided to eat people. He has a human past, regrets the decisions that led him where he is, and still has enough humanity left to question what he’s doing. Demon Slayer spends considerably more time developing those kinds of tragic backstories, but the basic idea is definitely present here.

The biggest difference is obviously the tone.

Demon Slayer can be goofy (and annoying) as hell when Zenitsu or Inosuke are running around acting like idiots, but when it gets serious, it gets serious. People die. Families get slaughtered. Characters get dismembered. Demons routinely have horrifying backstories involving abuse, starvation, illness, murder, and all kinds of other miserable shit.

KPop Demon Hunters is made for 12 year olds, and isn’t trying to put them into therapy.

Even when the story gets darker, the movie never stays there very long before somebody cracks a joke, makes a ridiculous face, or starts singing. It’s much lighter, much more colorful, and considerably more accessible to younger audiences. You still have demons stealing souls and characters dealing with guilt, shame, and identity problems, but the movie packages those things inside a pop musical where the heroes can literally save humanity by putting on a really good concert.

That difference is important if you’re going into this because somebody told you it was similar to Demon Slayer. I think most people who enjoy Demon Slayer could find something to like about KPop Demon Hunters, particularly if they enjoy the more colorful supernatural action and the human-versus-demon mythology. Just don’t expect Muzan to wander into the middle of a HUNTR/X concert and turn the audience into a pile of severed limbs.

This is still ultimately a movie made for younger viewers.

Maybe that’s why I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I went in expecting overhyped crap because whenever the entire internet tells me something is amazing, my immediate instinct is to assume the entire internet is full of shit. Sometimes I’m right. This time, not so much.

KPop Demon Hunters isn’t some cinematic masterpiece that changed my entire perspective on animation. I’m not buying a HUNTR/X shirt, learning Korean, or converting AJnet Magazine into a KPop Demon Hunters fan site. But it was fun, the music was catchy, the animation was interesting, and the story was good enough to hold my attention for the entire runtime.

That’s more than I expected going in.

A sequel has already been confirmed, although apparently we’re going to be waiting a while for it. Early reports pointed toward 2029, but it sounds like even that might have been optimistic considering how long these movies take to make.

I’m actually kind of interested to see what they do with it.

…

Goddammit. They got me.

AJ’s rating: 7/10

Angry_Jerk

Adam “The Angry Jerk” Baker is the CEO of The AJnet Organization and Editor-in-Chief of AJnet Magazine. A grizzled internet veteran of over 20 years, he writes about politics, culture, and whatever else manages to annoy him that day.

See author's posts