The Powerpuff Girls have never looked better thanks to the K-pop group NewJeans.
The globally successful and breakout girl group released a music video titled “New Jeans.” In it, the members of the group transform into animated character versions of themselves designed to look like The Powerpuff Girls. Over the course of the video, we see the girl group imagined as Powerpuff Girls that transform from 2D animated characters to pixelated characters fit for a video game. The video is an absolute joy as it pairs easy pop listening with an aesthetic that celebrates the colorful joy of ’90s animation and the early console era of video games.
NewJeans consists of five girls: Minji, Hanni, Danielle, Haerin, and Hyein. NewJeans was created by ADOR, the label under Hybe, and debuted in July 2022 with the single “Attention.” The group has had a limited number of releases since their debut — NewJeans has released a single EP and a handful of tracks — but that hasn’t stopped their rise to become one of the most prominent K-pop groups in the world. According to Billboard, the group was the fastest K-pop group to hit 1 billion streams on Spotify in under 219 days.
Now, fans have been anxiously awaiting the release of their second EP, Get Up. On June 18, the group released a 17-second teaser of a track from the EP and the short Powerpuff Girl visual and audio sparked hundreds of thousands of fans to post about it online. One fan created a filter called “powerpuff me” where fans could make their Powerpuff Girl personas and it was used over 628 hundred thousand times at the time of publication.
The video aligns with larger trends that show the resurgence of Y2K media and fashion. The music video gives cozy “hanging out with the girlies” vibes and pairs it with a variety of nostalgic digital aesthetics. Over the course of a few minutes, we see the girls as cartoon characters and then take on forms inspired by video games like nostalgic pixelated characters and angular polygonal 3D graphics reminiscent of early PlayStation games.
The music video just leaves me with one important question: When will we finally get a NewJeans video game?