KPop Demon Hunters

Maggie Kang pitched this in 2018 and directed it with Chris Appelhans. At the 98th Academy Awards it was nominated twice and won both, for Animated Feature Film and for Original Song with “Golden”. Speaking and singing went to different performers. Arden Cho voices Rumi while EJAE sings for her, having joined as a songwriter before she was offered the vocal. Mira and Zoey were built the same way. Korean folklore is material here rather than decoration. The rival group’s name plays on saja, which points at once to the messenger who escorts the dead and to the lion, hence their lion head logo. The blue tiger and the magpie beside Jinu come out of hojakdo, a strand of minhwa folk painting in which the pairing carries an old joke about class. The characters speak English, yet their mouth shapes were animated to Korean phonetics. The glitter thrown through the fights was lifted from The Villainess. Animation director Josh Beveridge has said you can go fairly violent once you put enough glitter on it, which pushes the brawling toward dance. A good fit if you want the songs to be where the plot advances, not numbers dropped between scenes. Not for anyone who will read the swerve from glamorous to angular to comic deformation inside one scene as inconsistency.