195 words about KPop Demon Hunters

“The future belongs to crowds,” Don DeLillo wrote in Mao II, and while he wasn’t talking about KPop Demon Hunters he wasn’t not talking about it, either. The movie — probably the best animated film since Sony’s last weirdly personal, auteurist sci-fi action-comedy, The Mitchells Vs The Machines — succeeds largely by throwing a few more hyphens into the mix. Specifically, how had no one thought to fuse the polyglot bombast of K-pop with the narrative stakes of a musical? The songs — NewJeans-tier stuff, just unreasonably good — serve double duty, advancing a nuanced critique of the very fandoms it dramatizes. If “Takedown” represents toxic fan armies, and “Idol” represents literalized hero worship, “Golden” proposes a third path, in which the shared network of fandom can actually serve as a community not just for fans but for the imperfect, work-in-progress “idols” they stan. The Force, here, is community — the crowds as magic. As a slyly dialectical entertainment, Hunters recalls Brad Bird’s better Pixar movies, without his weird Randian streak. Sure you can move the crowd, it asks, but at what cost? Toward what end? Somewhere, Kendrick is dialing his therapist.