"City Hunters" (Not to be confused with the anime "City Hunter") was a short animated series aimed to adults which was developed in Argentina for the Fox Latin American Channel. It also co-produced by Unilever for the AXE brand.
The most impressive aspect of "City Hunters" was the animation. It was pretty well made, with a convincing combination of CGI with traditional animation techniques. Also, the characters designs done by the comic artist Milo Manara were simply excellent.
On the other side, I didn't like very much the plot of this series. It was extremely chauvinistic (Though I shouldn't be surprised by that) to the point of being ridiculous. The main characters is an unlikeable loser who is "trained" by an old Casanova (Who is another unlikeable character) in the art of seducing women. This "training" basically consists into lying and manipulating women, portraying them only as pleasure objects in an almost dehumanizing manner. Sometimes this behavior is "justified" by showing the female characters being just as manipulative as the male characters, but in my opinion that merely felt immature.
The writing wasn't exactly the most stellar aspect of this short series, dealing most of the time with annoying stereotypes that somebody could expect from a really bad web comic. And pretty much like some bad web comics, this has an awesome art, but an awful story.
However, I still have to give some credit to this series. Despite being deeply flawed, one does have to recognize all the effort which was put in a production like this (Especially in what concerns to the technical aspects) particularly in Latin America, where animation is still perceived by many people as a children's medium only.
If only the plot were so good as the animation...
The most impressive aspect of "City Hunters" was the animation. It was pretty well made, with a convincing combination of CGI with traditional animation techniques. Also, the characters designs done by the comic artist Milo Manara were simply excellent.
On the other side, I didn't like very much the plot of this series. It was extremely chauvinistic (Though I shouldn't be surprised by that) to the point of being ridiculous. The main characters is an unlikeable loser who is "trained" by an old Casanova (Who is another unlikeable character) in the art of seducing women. This "training" basically consists into lying and manipulating women, portraying them only as pleasure objects in an almost dehumanizing manner. Sometimes this behavior is "justified" by showing the female characters being just as manipulative as the male characters, but in my opinion that merely felt immature.
The writing wasn't exactly the most stellar aspect of this short series, dealing most of the time with annoying stereotypes that somebody could expect from a really bad web comic. And pretty much like some bad web comics, this has an awesome art, but an awful story.
However, I still have to give some credit to this series. Despite being deeply flawed, one does have to recognize all the effort which was put in a production like this (Especially in what concerns to the technical aspects) particularly in Latin America, where animation is still perceived by many people as a children's medium only.
If only the plot were so good as the animation...
