directed by Avid Liongoren
written by Manny Angeles, Paulle Olivenza, and Lliongoren
One
doesn’t have to be a genius to figure out what the makers of “Hayop Ka” were
going for when they made the film; it’s basically a send-up of every single
Filipino drama film that revolves around some form of infidelity, of which
there have been quite a lot lately. The only difference is that the characters
are all animated, anthropomorphized animals.
So, Hayop
Ka is the story of Nimfa Dimaano (voiced by Angelica Panganiban) an
anthropomorphized cat who works as a saleslady in a department store, which is
basically a thinly-veiled SM. She lives with her janitor boyfriend, an “askal”
named Roger (voiced by Robin Padilla) who never helps her out with the bills
and is basically happy to just coast along in life, treating her to the same
“pares” restaurant regardless of the occasion, and screwing her brains out
every chance he gets. (Yes, there’s quite a bit of interspecies coitus that goes
on in this particular universe.) Nimfa,
however dreams of more, even though her friend and fellow saleslady Jhermelyn
(not sure what kind of animal she’s supposed to be but she is played by Arci
Muñoz) tells her she’s lucky to have Roger in her life. When handsome and rich
Iñigo (a husky voiced by Sam Milby) buys perfume for his mother from Nimfa,
though, things start to heat up for her as she catches a glimpse of what life
could be like on “the other side.”
Now,
the novelty is good for quite a few laughs, and in the beginning, the
storytelling worked well enough to draw me in. The folks who made this film
are, after all, the folks behind Saving Sally, a film which, for all its
flaws, was genuinely entertaining, with a good mix of both humor and heart. They know how to tell a story, and with what I
can only imagine is more money than they had when making their inaugural
feature film, they deliver some pretty memorable visuals and some really
polished animation.
After
a while though, it basically became clear to me that this film had absolutely
nothing new to say on the “infidelity” subgenre; it was positioning itself as a
send-up but then played out most, if not all of the cliches that usually plague
these movies like the best friend who lusts after the happy-go-lucky,
ambition-free boyfriend, the heroine’s desire for a better life, and so on and
so forth.
The
movie starts with a promising premise about rich-boy Iñigo hating labor unions
and the trouble they cause, which could have directly led to a conflict between
him and rank-and-file worker Nimfa, but they never let it play out, opting
instead to have the source of their conflict be sexual rather than economic.
Perhaps even more disappointingly, after making repeated reference to the
economic gap between Iñigo and Nimfa, the filmmakers basically have her sad,
employment-related story play out in a mid-credits sequence that isn’t even
animated.
Saving
Sally was, make no mistake, flawed, and even the filmmakers have
acknowledged as much, but at least it felt like something that came from their
hearts. I don’t know how much creative input Rocketsheep had in writing Hayop
Ka, but when watching the tired old “infidelity” tropes play out, I really
couldn’t help but feel that these were shoved down by their throats by the
veterans of the commercial filmmaking scene, producers Piolo Pascual and Joyce
Bernal. Pascual even has a somewhat grating cameo near the end as a DJ who
lectures Nifma on what a horrible person she is, so the film has pretensions of
being some kind of morality play. It gets to have its furry cake and eat it
too; make of that what you will.
Look,
all of this said, I still believe Rocketsheep deserves the views on Netflix,
and the support, because really, we need local animation studios that can
produce feature-length content like this. I get that making a movie like this
is what can keep the studio alive to make its passion projects, and since none
of us can buy tickets and go to theaters, we can offer our support by adding to
its views on Netflix.
I just
hope they come up with something better next time.
6/10
