This was a total surprise to me when it popped up on Netflix. The preview looked intriguing but it didn’t seem like our thing. Then I read about its great reviews and its songs became legitimate hits so I knew I had to watch it. And you know what? It really is great. The premise of fighting demons through kpop is totally outlandish of course but is totally self-consistent. Its take on girl power is original, the choreography looks cool and the music is catchy. The art isn’t quite on par with the best in the industry but I’d say that this is overall better than anything put out by any of the other major US animation studios in years.

Rumi, Mira and Zoey are the three members of the K-pop girl group Huntrix, enjoying success at the top of the charts for years. Secretly, they are also demon hunters, the latest generation of a long line who use the power of song and music to protect the world from demons. After the release of Huntrix’s newest single “Golden”, the ruler of the demons Gwi-Ma becomes frustrated. One of his minions, Jinu, proposes a plan to form a K-Pop boy band composed of disguised demons to win over the humans and undermine Huntrix. Meanwhile Rumi, the lead singer, is having problems with her voice and is revealed to be hiding her own part-demon heritage from her fellow group members. Soon enough the Saja Boys show up on the music scene and become an overnight success. The members of Huntrix realize that they must beat them at the annual Idol Awards and so prepare a new song “Takedown”. But Rumi finds herself unable to perform the hateful anti-demon song and meeting secretly with Jinu. learns about his past and how he wants to break free of Gwi-Ma’s control.

It’s an outrageously wacky setup and doesn’t make that much sense. Why, for example, does Huntrix not opt for direct combat against the Saja Boys when they’re so powerful? But this isn’t really an action film at all and so intuitively we understand that the real conflict lies in putting up a better song and dance performance than them. Though the three girls leap, slash and tear their way through hordes of demons, it’s still part of the performance to make them look cool and utterly badass. And they do look badass. jumping out a plane and doing their make-up at the same time, strutting on the stage while belting out killer lyrics. To balance that out, they’re also shown bingeing out on junk food and ramyeon, relaxing in spas and hot springs. It’s a little forced maybe, but as others have pointed out, it’s a much more authentic and relatable approach to creating strong female characters who nonetheless feel feminine compared to what other Western studios have managed recently.

I’m not a fan of K-pop but it’s easy enough to notice that the music and style here are channeling acts like Blackpink. The songs are catchy, the lyrics are kickass and the message is empowering so they work alright for me. Even the songs of the Saja Boys are perfectly put together with just the right balance of superficial appeal and vapidity. The negative points are that the art isn’t quite as good as we might expect from a truly top tier studio. In terms of both character detail and animation quality, this is visually not as impressive as some of the recent animated films we’ve seen. They’re aping the style of the Spiderverse films without quite being able to reach that level of quality. It’s too bad that since this was a Netflix exclusive release, we don’t get hard numbers on the budget spent on making this and how well it did. I’d bet that this cost a lot less to make the big animated films that get theatrical releases.

From what I can tell, the success of this film came as a total surprise to Netflix as well as they didn’t engage in much promotion. It’s a genuine phenomenon with K-Pop fans loving the songs so much they became hits in their own right. Watching this, I could finally understand how virtual idols could actually make traction in the public mind. Less charitably, I also took this as proof of how a well-oiled machine can manufacture successful K-Pop hits and groups out of basically nothing at all. I’m not a K-Pop fan and this is aimed at audiences much younger than me. But even an old fogey like me can recognize that this is pure catnip to its target audience.