Fantasia Review: Hayop Ka! is a horny Filipino answer to Zootopia

Finally, a movie that's brave enough to answer the question: What if Zootopia were Filipino and (more) horny?

Hot off the heels of my review of the wonderfully campy superhero flick Zsazsa Zaturnnah, I'm back with a look at another Avid Liongoren movie. This one played at Fantasia back in its covid-impacted 2020 edition, and now it's getting the chance to take the stage again at this year's fest. 

Hayop Ka! is another really fun watch from Liongoren, one that takes its cues from telenovelas and sleezy late-night radio shows on which normal people call in to air their dirty laundry and romantic woes. The film's title is a popular phrase that's often uttered/shouted on telenovelas, translating to something like "You animal!" or "You son of a bitch!" A very fitting title for this movie, since the characters are anthropomorphized animals, and our protagonist's two love interests are both dogs, meaning they are literally sons of bitches. Clever, that.

Nimfa Dimaano is a cat who works as a perfume saleslady at a mall. Like so many in her neighborhood/life, she's working paycheck to paycheck, trying to make ends meet and supporting her loved ones. She pays for her sister's college tuition, hoping that she'll have a brighter future than slaving away in retail. She also shoulders most of the rent cost. Her boyfriend, Roger, works as a janitor, so he isn't the provider that Nimfa wants him to be. They live a humble life, one punctuated by frequent trips to a lowly beef stew stand. At night, Nimfa loves to watch romantic comedies and dream of a life that's more luxurious, more romantic, more like what she sees on screen.

Enter: Iñigo Villanueva, a hot husky businessman who seems like a generally sweet guy, but whose horniness means he has trouble keeping a relationship going. After a fling brings his three-year relationship (a record for him) to an end, he meets Nimfa while she's working, and immediately takes a liking to her. So Nimfa very much becomes a telenovela star, entering into a love triangle, lying to Roger about her whereabouts, picturing a future where everything is provided for her rather than by her. She's horny, she's messy, she's reckless. I love her.

It's so refreshing and fun to see a female protagonist who is a hornball and a mess. She's judged, sometimes rightfully so, but she also feels like a real person (or cat, I guess). Even though she's not always making the best decisions or acting responsibly, Nimfa's actions feel grounded, rooted in the kinds of anxiety that often settle in on us working-class folks. Economic insecurity, relationship woes, political instability. These are the pressures of the real world, and they translate well into this animated one, too. Sure, this is mostly a smutty, melodramatic bit of escapism, but like the genre it apes, it also reflects reality in many ways, which makes it a more interesting watch than you might expect from a movie that can be glibly summed up as "an animal love triangle." 

Though being, at its core, a telenovela does make the movie feel a bit slight. It's short (about 75 minutes long) and plays out more-or-less how you would expect based on the genre trappings, which means there ultimately isn't much to chew on or mull over. At times, it feels like an episode of a TV show than a fully-formed movie, which isn't the worst sin. It's a breezy watch in a lot of ways, and there are enough dramatic beats to keep things twisting and turning until the end. It certainly held my interest, all things considered.

It was also just fun to watch this so shortly after being introduced to Liongoren's work. In Hayop Ka!, you can see the seeds of promise that have fully bloomed in Zsazsa Zaturnnah, which is a better and more fleshed-out movie in every regard. Both movies have a core sweetness (though Hayop Ka! is less interested in that, I think), clever wordplay, worlds that feel real, inhabited. Watching these movies for Fantasia have made me a big fan of Liongoren and Rocketsheep Studio, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they do next.