K-Pop Redemption

It’s rare to find a good children’s movie in the streaming age.

Rebooted plots draw on nostalgia but offer little else. Animation has embraced the total Pixar-ification of the medium. And too often, the films become battlegrounds in the culture wars as committed ideologues seek to influence the next generation.

That’s why I was surprised to discover that Netflix’s new animated musical, K-Pop Demon Hunters, is a rare exception.

Demon Hunters crafts an original narrative from Korean folk stories, weaving together a tale of three magical singers who use their talents to protect humanity from soul-sucking demons. The Grammy-nominated soundtrack has some of the best original music since the 1990s Disney classics, and the animation innovatively fuses Western animation and Asian anime styles. What is perhaps more important, however, is that the film rejects the rehabilitative villain-as-victim trope that drives much of children’s storytelling today. Instead, the demons must do good deeds if they hope to redeem themselves.

The plot revolves around singers Rumi, Zoey, and Mira as they form a girl group called HUNTR/X—international pop sensations by day, magical demon slayers by night. Their hit new single “Golden” is set to seal the human world off from the demon world for good, until the demons mount a counteroffensive and form their own boy band to steal HUNTR/X’s fans, and with that fan base, the source of HUNTR/X’s power. The film plays out as a relatively straightforward tale of good vs. evil with some novel Korean elements folded in.