KPOP Demon Hunters: Sony's Eating Disney's Lunch Lately

Not usually one of those guys keeping track of which animation studio is killing it recently versus which one's falling back after a run of "flops", but I have to give a nod towards what SONY's been up recently on the animation front recently.

They started putting together a diverse body of work on the animated side of things, while, to some, those studios like Disney haven't really kept their eye on the prize as far as good animation is concerned. There'll probably be plenty who will rise up in righteous indignation at anyone disparaging the Mouse House but Sony deserves some "attaboys" for getting a few things right.

This is just acknowledging Sony Pictures Imageworks for doing a good job with the new animated movie "Kpop Demon Hunters" which was just released on Netflix. But they should also get some kudos for bringing us films such as 2022's "Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse" which I still think of as one of the better animated films in the last few years.

The recently released Kpop Demon Hunters also has more style and panache than many recent features produced by others. Sony has to like hearing comments such as "this is the beginning of a FRANCHISE" from fans and that they'dlike to see 2 or 3 seasons as a whole series.

But if you haven't seen it yet, there are of course all kinds of clips, reaction videos, character studies and story analysis on YouTube and elsewhere. Here's a quick peek at the animation style of the show.

What the heck did I just watch? It looked kind of like an animated Kpop girl group video (and there ARE plenty of those) but this was more like a lyric video for one of the songs on the show's soundtrack called "How It's Done" that sort of reminds me of BLACKPINK, TWICE or maybe ITZY (and if you know who they are, you know).

The song to me was incidental to the action of the trio of female kpop stars, (named Zoey, Rumi and Mira) taking care of the bad guys then jumping from the airplane and landing in a stadium with an adoring audience. But what's the movie about? Where are the demons?

Maybe you want to watch the Netflix trailer on YouTube? It gives a little more back story to the characters.

The animation does remind me of the Spider-Verse but the movie is in its own kpop universe, with what looks like a kpop girl group that is secretly hunting demons.

The group has the appropriate band name of "Huntr/x" and we find out the new boy's group that goes by the name "Saja Boys", are actually demons in disguise, emissaries or guides to the underworld and they are trying to steal the souls of Huntr/x' fans.

The boys appear on the scene and they cast a hypnotic, almost irresistible connection to their fans. But can Huntr/x fight back against the demonic Saja Boys?

But this sounds more like a puff piece for the movie. I thought this was about the improvements from Imageworks vs what Disney's put out recently?

Glad you asked because I was watching a video essay on YouTube from a newer film criticism voice by the name of Miguel Munuera whose videos I'd like to introduce you to. Miguel is coming up to his 2 year anniversary of uploading to YouTube, has only 24K subs but has almost 5 million views for his 44 videos so far. In the video, he points out Sony's recent high points while not ignoring the company's animated failures.

He mentions "Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs", "Arthur Christmas" and "Hotel Transylvania" but reminds us that they also were stuck in sequel mode, producing 10 weaker followups for 10 years. Misses like "The Emoji Movie" or "The Angry Birds Movie" were finally answered with the Spider-Verse and Lego movies and the animation used is being adopted by their competitors.

SamDoesArt and Surviving Art Tackle Pixar

The video below from Sam Does Art called "Pixar is in Big Trouble.. (artist's rant)" is from an actual Youtube artist with a sizeable audience of around 1.8M subs and over 162M views. I've actually watched many of Sam's video because I'm trying to become better as an artist myself and Sam's videos help me get there.

But this is about this video Sam uploaded a few days ago mentioning the release of a new Pixar movie called "Elio" that has received the lowest box office of any other Pizar release, which itself is notable, but also a lot of viewers don't like the same art style being employed by Pizar for a number of their most recent animated movies.

Maybe you can see the "Bean" animation where the mouth of every character takes the shape of a bean. This was a style used more in a 2D media like a flat comic book where the shape worked fine.

In a 3D world like in Elio, the style isn't as unique or like a "one-off", it almost implies a multi-verse feeling where you could exchange characters from one movie universe into the other.

It just felt like each Pixar release had characters artistically created uniquely to that film. Like each one was almost a unicorn in their movie. Now, not so much.

This one is from Surviving Animation, a YTer with about 25K subs and he wants to talk about the recent failure from Pixar of Elio and the success of Kpop Demon Hunters and basically do a "compare and contrast" various aspects of both films. He does cover Elio's esthetic and he really liked Kpop Demon Hunters with their clean, almost amine style. But you should watch the video as he gets a into deeper detail and the two movies.