You Animal! The Nimfa Dimaano Story ความรักของสาวเหมียว (2020) [บรรยายไทย]

Avid Liongoren’s Hayop Ka! The Nimfa Dimaano Story is quite a thing of beauty, with each of its lovingly-rendered frames worthy of being the centerpiece of a postcard.

The animated film is something that is pleasant to lay ones’ eyes on. It is colorful and vibrant. Its visual wit is often on point, with the film’s most effective jokes part and parcel of the lush and luscious visual screen.

Sadly, there isn’t just much beneath its enthusiastic veneer. The fun mostly ends when it becomes apparent that by taking away its cleverly realized animation, the film is largely lacking in real concept and imagination.

Hayop Ka! harkens to the golden age of titillation, when fruits and foodstuffs take on sexier meanings and regurgitated soap opera storylines of forbidden romances crossing social divides are mixed up with copious amounts of gratuitous nudity and sex.

There is crystal clear merit in resurrecting the genre, twisting its more forbidden pleasures through the flexibility afforded by animation, turning its horny characters into actual animals enraptured by their animalistic desires. It is wildly ingenious, if not deliciously subversive when done right.

Sadly, Liongoren’s efforts are all for an irresistible sprinkling of eye candy to an otherwise bland concoction.

Hayop Ka! follows the amorous escapades of Nimfa Dimaano (Angelica Panganiban), literally an alley cat working as a saleslady in a department store. She’s currently in a relationship with Roger (Robin Padilla), a muscle-bound mongrel who makes up for his lack of economic ambition with his lewd talents in the bedroom. Nimfa, however, gets involved with hunky and wealthy husky Inigo (Sam Milby), who shows her the possibilities of what life could be outside her daily meager existence.

The film proceeds towards the familiar grooves of the genre, piling jokes upon jokes, undermining whatever goal it has for resurrecting tropes from cinema reserved for closeted macho horndogs, whether it is just blunt nostalgia or subversion, with the most juvenile humor.