Selling unironic junk and political mania to children
By the time “Golden,” the new hit song debuted by Korean pop group Huntrix, reaches its second bar, one fan exclaims, “I love it already!” Such is the state of pop mania that’s commemorated in the wildly praised animated film KPop Demon Hunters.
This Sony-Netflix co-production advertises the irritating development of what used to be called bubble-gum pop but now comes at us translated through South Korean singing groups who are corporate fabrications (most arrive twelve per group, as if conscripted). They’re typically boy bands, but in KPop Demon Hunters, it’s a trio of female performers: Rumi, who wears a long, purple rat-tail braid; tall, angular-faced redhead Mira; and short, cropped-haired Zoey, always clutching her notebook of song lyrics.
Known as Huntrix for their alter-ego roles as dedicated ghostbusters, they’re not just pop stars. Between tours and recording sessions and signing autographs, they fulfill their Korean cultural duty to protect the world (the Honmoon) from demons who threaten mankind.
In KPop Demon Hunters, the group’s mission — and the film’s confused ideological message — is complicated by Rumi’s identity crisis. She’s of mixed parentage, half-human, half-demon (with tell-tale patterned tattoos underneath her costumes), and she embarks on a generic love story with Jinu, a member of rival boy-band Saja Boys, who hides his own demon roots.
Picture Huntrix as a three-headed brand logo via an animation style that borrows Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse flash, while adding Pixar cuteness. It’s a KPop music-industry breakthrough, a cartoon version of A Hard Day’s Night, simply to sell an industry franchise. Huntrix performs before crowds of 50,000 fans (shown like CGI dots from Lord of the Rings). Their “Idol Show” concert combines reality-TV competition with cartoons to pervert juvenile values. “It’s our most important show,” Zoey cries. “It’s how we strengthen the Honmoon for the entire year!”
Directors Maggie Kang and Chris Applehans portray the idol-fan relationship so that the pop audience resembles obsequious communist hordes. Using a girl-band archetype rather than the KPop boy bands now on the market (BTS, GOT7, NCT), Kang and Applehans stylize feminism after Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse to circumvent the fact that live-action female superheroes usually flop (Captain Marvel, WandaVision, Ms. Marvel, The Marvels). Huntrix updates what the Spice Girls meant to Nineties feminists.
Rumi, Mira, and Zoey voice their girly insecurities (“That’s the demon talking”), while the Saja Boys are, of course, androgynous, with Jinu the prettiest. The Saja Boys are introduced through cartoon metaphors that convey pubescent sexual attraction through junk food symbolism — from popcorn to “Soda Pop” (the film’s cleverest tune). Multiple Oscar nominations for KPop Demon Hunters disguise the gender competition behind its political message.
Just like those KPop groups patterned after Michael Jackson, NSYNC, and Destiny’s Child, the Huntrix girls don’t seem Korean so much as they look like mannequins. Even “Golden” (an Oscar contender for best original song) is a calculated hybrid: “Gonna be, gonna be golden / Oh, up, up, up with our voices,” with Korean lyrics interpolated. Polyglot pop traps all consumers in a world of gaslighted, formulaic muzak and pre-fab celebrityhood. Through such pop infatuation, South Korea’s Honmoon retains obsessive ties to North Korean despotism, as Parasite suggested. Yet this cartoon doesn’t satirize pop mania as Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer did. Instead, this pop junk operates on the same terms as the Barbie movie; in this proto-socialist era, it’s another unironic example of capitalist trash.
KPop’s hard sell of the comic-book supernatural and showbiz fantasy is so frantic and frenetic that tween girls who like Wicked or Broadway’s … And Juliet might think it fresh, but for anyone else, it will induce pop fatigue. (Reviewers who praise this over The Minecraft Movie want to enslave moviegoers.) Pretending that the Huntrix gals fight to “fix the world” is just Taylor Swiftie authoritarianism, finally ripping off Prince’s “When Doves Cry” for pop domination. Shame on parents who permit their children to buy this corporate idolatry. KPop Demon Hunters de-Westernizes pop through shrill commercial imitation.
