Tany Mena (2018)
★★½ — Tany Mena (2018)
Why do we watch films from places we'll probably never visit? That question sits at the heart of my A-Z World Movie Tour, and Tany Mena, my Madagascan entry, is about as honest an answer to it as I've come across. It doesn't have a story, exactly. It doesn't have protagonists to root for or a plot to follow. What it has is a city, Antananarivo, and a collection of artists willing to show you what that city feels like from the inside.
The format is anthology stop motion animation, with each short segment crafted by a different artist who then explains the thinking behind their work. It's an unconventional structure, and I won't pretend it makes for the most gripping ninety-odd minutes. Some segments land with more force than others, and because the styles shift so dramatically between pieces, it can feel a little uneven, like flipping through a sketchbook rather than reading a novel. But that's also, in a strange way, part of the point.
What struck me most is how personal it all feels. This isn't a tourist board version of Madagascar, all beaches and wildlife. It's artists talking about their own streets, their own communities, their own way of seeing. The stop motion itself varies wildly in technique and polish, and I actually found that variety refreshing. You're not watching a unified studio aesthetic. You're watching individual voices, which is a very different thing. It reminded me a little of the approach in Fantastic Planet (1973), where the strangeness of the animation style is inseparable from what the film is trying to say. Here, the patchwork quality IS the message: this city contains multitudes, and no single hand could capture it alone.
I'll be straight with you: as a piece of filmmaking, it's patchy. There are moments where it genuinely moves and surprises, and moments where it feels more like a curated exhibition piece than a film. If you sat down expecting a conventional animated feature, you'd likely be baffled and a bit bored. But I wasn't watching it quite like that. I was watching it as someone who knows full well he's never going to catch a flight to Antananarivo and wander those streets himself. And on that level, it does something genuinely valuable.
That's really why the A-Z World Movie Tour exists for me. The world is enormous, and most of it is out of reach for most of us, whether that's down to money, time, circumstance or any number of other things. Film can bridge some of that distance, not perfectly, not as a substitute for actually being somewhere, but as a way of hearing voices you'd otherwise never encounter. Tany Mena is built almost entirely out of those voices, artists from the city itself deciding what matters, what's worth preserving in animation, what they want someone like me to understand about where they're from.
That has real worth. I came away knowing more about Antananarivo than I did going in, and not in a dry, Wikipedia sort of way. More in the way you know a place after someone who loves it has talked to you about it properly. That's not nothing. That's actually quite a lot.
Is it a film I'd recommend to someone with no interest in the project behind it? Probably not. It's too loose, too fragmented, and too dependent on context to work as a straightforward watch. But for what I needed from it, and for what it set out to do, it earns its place. Two and a half stars, and I mean that warmly rather than as a shrug.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2025-07-04
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Kim Yip Tong: Ebony (2017)
More from Mauritius: Ebony (2017)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
