as promised: my review of KPop Demon Hunters

I'll just copy-paste here for anyone who doesn't wanna go to letterboxd:

let's assume kpop demon hunters is what it wants to be. this is me, as is my wont, pulling out goethe's three questions: what is the art trying to do, is it successful, and is that worth doing? there are a lot of things I can point to as "flaws" in kpdh, but I suspect - at least by the film's own metrics - these flaws are not failings. there are plot threads that don't go anywhere, ethical/ontological questions raised and not engaged with, muddled themes, bizarre choices in pacing, sizable and relevant gaps in its lore, and I can't argue any of that gets in the way of what the movie is trying to do. these things were not likely "missed" in the production process, they were simply allowed to remain because addressing them would not meaningfully improve the film, at least not by the filmmakers' own standards. we will engage, somewhere in this review, with whether we want to share those standards, but let's go through the questions one by one.

WHAT IS THE FILM TRYING TO DO?
in my estimation, the film is attempting to be a companion piece to a banger kpop album. this raises two follow-up questions: why release the companion piece as a feature film, and is the album an authentic kpop banger?

per the first subquestion, as a kids film and primarily streaming endeavor, I have to accept the lines between feature film, direct-to-vod, music video, and content-to-park-your-kids-in-front-of are, at this time, in this instance, gone. obliterated. everything is transmedia, cross-platform, and kids aren't interested in distinctions. the target demographic for this spent many formative years in lockdown, theater screen and big tv and ipad in a squishy soft case and smartphone are all just windows into The Content. the album and the movie and the fortnite skins are all one thing. there is no primacy to "feature film."

I am not qualified to say whether the kpop album is authentic. it is a banger. soda pop can give you withdrawal if you listen to it too much and then stop. what it sounds like is the perfect emotional swell to project my dissident leftist feelings onto. your idol should not soar so good as a villain song. how its done not only whips but lands as only nominally-above filler because it shares a track listing with golden. there's even an entirely skippable love song, which feels appropriate.

within that album is an emotional arc and a bunch of themes that the movie serves to flesh out, but they work better on the album. the idea that you have been masking your damage from your loved ones on the fear they will reject you, and discovering you guaranteed that rejection by hiding it, is kiiiiiinda botched in the film because, you know, the thing rumi hid is that she's a demon? and they kill demons? it is not a smooth metaphor for the things people hide from each other. and they reconnect over the other characters' baggage, the secrets mira and zoey also kept that resonate with rumi's, are not really character culminations because they are things already known and stated, again and again, as resolved throughout the film. when listening to the songs, you can extrapolate that, no, mira's antisociality and zoey's fear of revealing herself were not fixed by being in huntr/x, they are ongoing aspects of their character, scars just like rumi's, that will flare up in times of stress, that have to be managed and cared for, that they can backslide, and that making them core to their stage personae can be both healing and a way of getting stuck in them, unwilling to let them go because you've made them definitional to your art, like how slug from atmosphere can't ever let go of lucy ford because he has to sing about her every night. none of that is actually in the movie, but the movie is not the story, the story exists somewhere between the movie and the album and the fortnite skins and future sequels and spinoffs, and is viewed in glimpses through half a dozen different screens and often played with divided attention; there is room to project these themes back into the margins as you're teasing them out of the lyrics.

IS IT SUCCESSFUL?
let's just walk through the flaws here:

are demons evil? they eat souls. it is vague what happens when a soul is eaten. it seems worse than death, because huntr/x definitely kills demons but killing them just sends them back to the demon world, whereas soul-eating does... something more? lotta souls get eaten and I dunno what happens to them. lotta demons seem enthusiastic about this work, but a lot just seem like they are doing the bidding of gwi-ma, so maybe they are victims? or slaves to their nature? like, bitches gotta eat. the idea that demons are ontologically evil is challenged by rumi being half-demon (so her mom loved a demon? or... something worse? do demons do that worse thing?) and also she falls in love with a demon who has a whole redemption arc. partway through the film the villain has been emotionally recoded as gwi-ma in specific, not demonkind as a whole, but victory still comes from sealing away demonkind. presumably all these questions are left for sequels, but, motherfucker, you brought it up, whether or not huntr/x just committed a warcrime feels very relevant to how I should feel about the ending!

zoey and mira are underdeveloped, both narratively and just... their role in the band. "mira is the main dancer" no she's not, they all dance about the same amount; "zoey is the rapper" no she's not they all rap about the same amount. and I dunno a lot about kpop, the nearest-neighbor for me is imagining, like, what if the universe hung in the balance of backstreet boys vs. *nsync (which is very funny), but in either framework I know it's wild to pretend they write their own songs. and I dunno how it is in korea, but, in the states, boy band producers had no souls to eat. so all that's weird.

rumi's scars don't make a ton of sense and the ticking clock of the problem they are causing doesn't work if you think about it. the scars fuck with her singing voice - oh no! then it's tossed off that, since she started flirting with jinu, the problem has gone away. ostensibly a nice theme about how the problem was her denial of her nature, not her nature itself, but this was the literal manifestation of her core conflict and it is just tossed away in a single sentence before a totally mid love song. and yeah she's a teenager and jinu is like 400 and I'm not gonna get into that because what is even left to say about this trope but I'm not gonna not mention it.

there's plenty more. pacing's weird. animation is phenomenal whenever it goes stylized, either in the choreography of dancing/fighting/dance-fighting or in the goofy expressiveness of eating noodles like a gremlin/popcorn eyes for a hot boy; unfortunately sometimes people just have to sit in a room and talk and that looks like ps2 cutscenes. and the animators seem to know this cuz they take any opportunity to ramp up the style but they can't stretch it the whole movie.

so the subquestion here is: does any of that matter? like, they are, objectively, "flaws," in that the movie would be, again, objectively better if these were otherwise. but I come back, often, in genre work especially, to the question of "the goods." an action movie is better if its story works and its characters are rich, but, if it delivers bomb-ass action scenes it works and if it has rich characters and good story and it's action sucks then it might be a decent movie in some respects but it is failing to deliver the goods. there are simply things that matter in certain genres and things that matter less.

kpdh forces me to ponder what "the goods" are now, for this kind of product. because they are not the same goods as the animated movie musicals I grew up with: beauty and the beast is a better movie than pocahontas even though pocahontas' animation is more impressive and the songs slap at least as hard, because beauty and the beast has richer characters and stronger themes and a more cohesive plot and, in those days, that mattered. I can't tell that it matters here, at least not as much. pocahontas' flaws are more critical than kpdh's. disney renaissance films are held to the standard of... well, I wanna say animated kids movies, but really they work more as broadway shows? that was ashman and menken's big thing, the thing that brought disney back from the brink: stop approaching them as kids movies and start approaching them as theatrical productions.

kpop demon hunters is approached less as an animated film than as a piece of pop music culture. complaining about thematic muddiness is like asking whether kiss' stage shows maintain continuity with the psycho circus comics. it is a problem if the properties are incohesive, but they do not need a strict canon. as a transmedia property, kpdh actually seems more cohesive than a lot of musical acts with lore. I know what's going on in this movie a lot better than I know what's going on in florence + the machine's the odyssey, and I'm not saying florence welch is a useful referent when looking at kpop but she is perhaps a closer referent than beauty and the beast.

IS THIS A THING WORTH DOING?
dog, I dunno. like, in isolation? yeah! it feels a little weird that the song what it sounds like gives me feelings that are not fully supported by the text, that I have to treat the song in a musical as more textual than the musical's actual plot, but those themes still resonate. that these three demon hunters are fighting evil but, crucially, their power derives from their audience, that artists become conduits for the power of the collective, feels meaningfully different from the individualistic cowboy affect of a lot of western/white-led films. it is a balm in these times of injustice. and it does not make a point of this the way a lot of pixar and disney movies seem like powerpoint presentations, "see we studied latin america! we studied maori culture! we got it right!" I'm not claiming to know whether this is an authentically korean theme, and I like not knowing, that the movie is not interested in explaining how much if this is cultural difference and how much is the filmmakers' own proclivities. it just is and it is different from what I'm used to and I can appreciate that.

but is this thing, this multimedia children's entertainment in which no single part of the property is the true referent, the canonical element, and in which plot jank is irrelevant because the plot is a thing you're only supposed to half-remember when blasting the album for the fortieth time... is that thing good? is that worth doing? is it good for a movie to function best when you're not paying full attention to it, like how a christmas story really belongs in the background on a holiday and falls apart if sat and experienced in its fullness? am I okay with this?

I am interested in it. ever the descriptivist, I think this is a thing that is happening, has been happening, and the message is evolving to fit the medium and the medium of streaming is not necessarily one I think is good for art but I find the way art adapts to new mediums compelling. yes, it takes on the needs of that medium, and, when that medium is predatory, damaging to art, the art becomes a tool of that predation. but it is also an adaptation to adversity, and producing something with rich themes in its weird negative spaces, and just good music and expressive animation, in spite of the affordances it makes to the form (and regardless of whether the filmmakers even consider them affordances) is remarkable, and special, and kinda cool.

I will take the good with the bad. I will grab the good where I find it. and this is good. it's weird and jank and if I step back and look at the whole pipeline it is kind of ugly, but everything produced in ugly systems is kinda ugly when you step back, and ain't shit getting made without them these days. so I take the good as well. and this is good.