Dayo: Sa Mundo ng Elementalia (Tagalog for, roughly, "Stranger in the Land/World of Elementalia", and often shortened just to Dayo) is a 2008 Filipino animated film.
It features Buboy, a precocious, school-aged kid, who acting on a dare by a gang of school bullies, suddenly finds himself in the titular land of Elementalia—a beautiful fantasy land populated by all the creatures known to Philippine mythology and folklore, including kapres, tikbalangs, aswangs, and those classic, self-segmenting Winged Humanoids, manananggals—including young Anna, who quickly becomes his best friend.
An English dub exists, under the new title Niko: Journey to Magika.
Provides examples of:
- 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: Most of the animation style is 2-D digital, but occasionally obviously 3-D assets are used, like aeroplanes in flight, or the "ball" of sirenas (merfolk) in one scene.
- Bilingual Dialogue: Buboy's conversation with the Kapres. or Basically most some of the characters speak. English, Tagalog or Bisayan.
- Kapres also speak Bisayan and Buboy have a little time what it means so he ask the Kapre to speak in Tagalog and they both understand since Bisayan is widely spoken in Visayas and Mindanao.
- Anna and his guardians speaks Taglish.
- Dub Name Change: Buboy's name is changed to "Niko" in the English dub.
- Four-Fingered Hands: You’d expect a movie inspired in part by Western children’s animation styles to have this on all its characters, but the animators made the conscious decision to give only supernatural creatures four fingers, making it a sign of their otherworldliness. Humans like Buboy, his family, neighbours, etc., all have the good old five fingers per hand. The difference is quite obvious in any scenes with 5-fingered Buboy and 4-fingered Anna together, which is for most of the film.
- Conveniently an Orphan: At least Buboy says; his parents died in an accident when he was a baby.
- Corrupt Politician: It's the Philippines (well, sort of), so at least one such character is made like this: Anna's own father is head of the Elementalia Portal Authority.
- Death by Childbirth: Anna says her own Missing Mom succumbed to this, giving birth to her.
- Gratuitous English: The whole movie, considering its use of Taglish, but it's really egregious with Anna despite coming from another world. Likewise, Anna's dad's underlings.
- Product Placement: A lot of children's snacks, junk foods, and eateries have their brand names prominently plastered in various scenes, especially in the human world; understandable given it's one of the easier ways the animators could get their money's worth on the film. Bonus points since it's a Philippine Product
- There's a Mister Donut … donut shop, one of Buboy's favourite places to eat at with his grandparents.
- Candies like Frootees.
- There's even multivitamins for kids, like the Ceelin ascorbic-acid one.
- Shown Their Work: In particular with respect to Philippine mythology, showing various creatures from the local pantheons and folklore. And also gets to show Philippine attractions like SM Mall of Asia, EDSA, wooden utensils as decorations, Last supper at the dining room.
- Vegetarian Vampire: Manananggals, as one of the Philippine equivalents of vampires, generally eat human livers or foetuses or drink their blood, but precocious young Anna calls herself a vegetarian. Buboy's understandably suspicious, but Anna reasons that she'd have already eaten him if she were so inclined.
- Winged Humanoid: The manananggals like Anna, her dad, and his underlings. Par for the course in Philippine mythology, they can sever themselves at the waist, fly away when needed, and return to their lower halves, hence the term manananggal (literally, "severing"). They're fully capable of flying intact (i.e., with their lower halves attached) though.
