A K-pop trio fights demons between encores, and the film is faster, funnier and better drawn than that sentence suggests. The songs are good, the faces are better, and the story underneath is the ordinary one. Worth your evening, especially with children.
Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans have made a film whose premise sounds like a pitch meeting that got out of hand: a K-pop girl group who fight demons between shows. What they have actually made is a brisk 96-minute musical comedy that takes both halves of that sentence seriously and mostly gets away with it. The concerts are staged like concerts and the fights like fights, and the film’s best idea is that they are the same thing. Huntr/x sing to a stadium and the stadium’s love builds the wall that keeps the demons out. Everyone in Seoul is doing the girls’ job without knowing it.
The drawing is the reason to watch. Production designers Mingjue Helen Chen and David Bleich give Seoul a wet neon shine and give the demon realm a single colour, a red that looks lit from underneath, so you always know where you are. The Honmoon itself is drawn as threads of blue and violet light stitched across the sky, and it is a pleasure to look at every time it appears. But the faces are what stay with us. The three girls spend half the film as glossy idols and the other half with eyes bulging, jaws unhinged and mouths stuffed with noodles, and the animators switch between the two in a single frame when a joke needs it. This is the exaggeration hand-drawn cartoons used to do and computer animation usually cannot, and here it can.
Arden Cho plays Rumi as the leader who is carrying something and cannot put it down, and she lands the spoken scenes, which is what a voice cast is for. May Hong’s Mira is tall, prickly and quick to a sneer; Ji-young Yoo’s Zoey writes the lyrics and eats everything. The friendship between the three is written with enough small business, shared sofas, snacks, arguments over food, that we believed in it before the plot asked us to. Ahn Hyo-seop gives Jinu, the demon with the boy band, a soft-spoken regret that is more interesting than anything his boss has to say. Lee Byung-hun’s Gwi-Ma is a face in a fire pit who shouts. He is on screen a good deal and does almost nothing else.
The Saja Boys’ debut is where we laughed hardest, and then laughed at ourselves for it. Five demons in pastel, hair like meringue, sing a number called Soda Pop to a street full of fans, and the fans, and for one shot Mira and Zoey too, go slack-jawed with love. The joke is on manufactured pop and on the people who fall for it, and the film knows its own songs are built the same way. They are good songs, worked hard, with hooks you will be humming in the kitchen next morning. Marcelo Zarvos’s score does the connecting work between them and stays out of their way. Nathan Schauf cuts the fights to the beat, so a sword stroke and a drum hit land together, and the action is legible from start to finish, which is rarer than it should be.
The story underneath is the ordinary one. Rumi has a secret; the secret is shame; the shame must be spoken aloud to be lifted. The four credited writers, Hannah McMechan, Danya Jimenez, Kang and Appelhans, build to that with care, and the scene where it finally breaks moved us more than we were ready for, in a film with a tiger in it. But every animated studio film of the last decade has walked this road, and the last fifteen minutes hurry through a great deal of business, including a change of heart we wanted more time with. Mira and Zoey get a line of backstory each and then have to make do.
One critic has called the soundtrack tedious and the whole thing filler. We do not agree, but we take the point about the songs: they share a single glossy production, and after five of them the ear stops noticing where one ends. The film would say that this is what pop is, and it is, but the sameness is still there.
Set against recent studio animation this sits well above the middle, drawn with more nerve than most and shorter than nearly all of them. Certificate PG, 96 minutes, and if there are children in the house you will be watching it again by Tuesday.
