The Character Acting is So Unsatisfying
I mean we have this, right? This creative style where the characters’ eyes and mouths can completely change shape and go extreme to match Eastern animation tropes of comedy expressions every time there’s a joke, right?
So then you know they can figure out how to “break realism” and animate in extremes when they want to make you laugh.
But they can’t do that when any other emotion is called for.
They can’t push their art when emotions that are not comedy are called for.
I think this is noticeable when Rumi is sad, or angsty, most often. She just has this same bland expression on her face:
What do I mean by “same bland expression?” I mean her eyebrows don’t affect her lateral orbital rim much at all. I’m talking about this line:
What that line really affects is the shape of the eye. Facial expressions distort the eye. They squash it or stretch it.
But you argue, “In those examples, Rumi is supposed to be feeling locked down, and sort of dead inside, so of course her face would be bland and shut down, too.”
Yeah, except she has this same facial expression problem when she’s supposed to be feeling genuine romantic excitement and potential passion for a boy (not a joky reference to having a crush, but a moment where the audience is supposed to feel her growing attachment on a more mature level)
Do you see that neither his face nor her face are communicating anything more than “I’m thinking seriously about a concept, like I might if studying for a test or zoning out while driving?”
And she has this same problem when she is supposed to feel loss and anguish, in one of the most emotional scenes in the movie, too.
This is when she’s begging her friends not to leave. And also, I want you to pay attention; when Mira, her friend, gets a tight close up, and the camera is on her specifically to show you what her little sobs are indicating; that she’s “breaking down” because of Rumi’s secret, THIS is the facial expression they use to go with the little sobs:
What’s going on with her mouth? Nothing. No little corner-twitches to reveal that she’s fighting back ugly tears. No eyebrow movements. No lines around the nostrils or cheeks. It didn’t have to be big but it had to be there. And instead the animators went “I guess the beat sheet says ‘Mira closes her eyes sadly’ so that’s what I’ll do.” Or something. And the same thing for Zooey: when the voice actress’ tones are shaking, when she’s saying, “you kept this from us? I knew it. I knew it was too good to be true.” This bland mess is her facial expression. Her mouth barely moves.
Oh boy. The betrayal. 🙄 <- That emoji has more raw emotion clearly communicated to the audience than the faces animated above.
It is nowhere more noticeable than in SONGS, which are like a double-edged sword. Because songs are already firing up the audience’s emotions. The melodies, beats, and voices can do that by themselves. BUT because songs amplify emotion, that should make it very important that the character’s FACE MATCHES the level of emotion you’re hearing in the song. This is a common principal even in real-life performances: have you ever seen a music video where the musician’s face wound up looking less passionate while singing than you imagined it while you were simply listening to his voice on the radio?
But maybe you don’t know what I mean because you’ve been watching this movie nonstop, and then listening to the soundtrack, and projecting the emotions that the characters voices communicate onto their actually-bland faces. So, you see what’s not actually there. Let me help you.
Here are examples of animated movies where the same basic level of raw emotion is communicated not just with the voice acting, but is MATCHED by the face and acting:
The voice actress singing this song is sobbing through it. Well guess what? The voice actresses in KPOP: Demon Hunters do that, too, with their characters’ lines. You can hear it when Rumi is explaining that she was supposed to have erased her marks before her friends saw them, begging them not to leave. You can specifically hear their breathing get unsteady.
Now look at Anna in the gif above. When she says “what comes then?” Watch her eyes roll around as if she’s looking at a foggy, uncertain haze of fear in her head. Watch her whole upper body ever-so-slightly bounce with the catch in her breathing, because she’s crying. You can see her lip tremble. You can see her eyelids twitch because she’s about to sob again and she’s barely holding it in.
None of that is happening in KPOP: Demon Hunters, even though the characters’ voice actresses were probably doing all those little micro-expressions while talking in real life. The closest we get is this:
And again, that’s one hold-on-a-crying-pose, there aren’t any subtler smaller movements of features, there’s nothing nuanced, no little details to add punctuation to the point. Just a quick cut-and-dry “fanart of a crying person” pose.
That means the emotion of the scene, of the story, is not matching the emotion of the character-acting. In a live action movie, we’d call that, “BAD ACTING.”
A smaller, less egregious example that happens throughout the whole movie is when the characters are supposed to be belting out a note. Usually, it’s Rumi. Sometimes it’s Jinu. But their mouths barely open. Their cheeks don’t swell or cave like a real singer’s would. Their bodies don’t curl around the air their releasing. And you know they could, right? You’ve seen it before in other movies, and it’s important, because it helps you believe that the pixels onscreen are genuinely producing that impactful, gut-wrenching note. Look.
Look at her tongue vibrate. Look how you can suddenly see her jaw structure because of how wide she’s opening her mouth, which stretches her cheek flesh.
Look at how Elsa’s whole body, face, and jaw move in time with the rising and falling vibrato of Idina Menzel’s voice. If I had to be poetic about it I’d say
her body acting is to the song what a leaf on a breeze is: you can’t see the breeze, but you know exactly what it’s doing because you can see the leaf that is carried by it.
That gives the song power. That adds to the emotion of the scene, it drives it home, instead of disconnecting you from it.
And if you don’t believe me, if you try to pull some crap like “oh you just only have a taste for Disney faces, this is a style choice,” no, no no it’s not. The same studio made facial expressions like these:
When you know what is good, and you appreciate it, you can see where something that falls short is bad. KPOP: Demon Hunters doesn’t do these things, either because 1) it’s lazy, or 2) what is far more likely (because we saw they can work hard on other, funnier things:
The animators are more comfortable being “funny” and “epic” (especially when angsty fear and cool-monster-temper are “epic”) than they are vulnerable or genuine with their acting.
Which is funny, considering the movie’s whole thing is about being “vulnerable” and showing off your scars.
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