Fantasia Festival 2026: Philippine Animation Goes Furry and Sexy Soap Opera in ‘Hayop Ka!’
By Caroline Cao | July 23, 2026 | Best TV Shows of the Week
When viewing the adult animated Hayop Ka! screener for Fantasia Festival, I encountered an unusual caveat. The Fantasia Festival screener didn’t bear English subtitles, although the spurts of English coexisting bilingualistically with Tagalog aided this English speaker. I resorted to my film teacher’s maxim, “If you can mute an entire film and you’ll understand it, then it has done its job.”
Worry not; any good eye can identify Hayop Ka!, directed by Avid Liongoren and with a screenplay by Manny Angeles and Paulle Olivenza, as a splashy animated feature with its colorful, cartoony, and erotic pleasures. Its shortcoming is that it feels more like a pilot for a series than a film itself. The movie was previously released in Annecy in 2020 and was made available on Netflix in some countries, but it hasn’t made its way to American Netflix yet. If you love dramatic soap operas and flirted with the furry fandom, this one is for you.
A production by Rocketsheep Studio and Spring Films, Hayop Ka! is set in a Manila populated with anthropomorphic animals, with the bubbly, big-eyed designs that make an adult mistake it for a kid’s film. The cat Nimfa Dimaano (Angelica Panganiban) pines for an exciting sex life. A poor perfume seller, she’s dissatisfied with a proposal by her mongrel boyfriend Roger (Robin Padilla).
It doesn’t help that he suggests she stop supporting her sister’s education to save money. One day, Nimfa has a meet-cute with Iñigo Villanueva (Sam Milby), a high-powered businessman dog, at the perfume shop, and it leads to a passionate affair, and the film spends precious time building up to sexual intercourse (expressed hilariously in uncanny facial expressions and puckered lips). What she doesn’t know is that he already has a paramour in Marie (Madeleine Humphries), a poodle. Needless to say, the climax launches into an explosion of cat-dog fights.
Is Hayop Ka! entirely for me? If you wish for an animated film to settle as a classic in your brain, I doubt so. But it’s a bit of a tall order to expect more. But is it frivolously fun 73 minutes? Yes, when it’s funny, it’s fun. Might it have elements of a cult classic? Time might tell. If the Philippines’ animation industry is lavishly bankrolled for its labor, the animators would have more fun conceiving seasons of furry soap operatic sagas.
Photo credit: courtesy of Netflix
