Tany Mena (2018)
★★½ — Tany Mena (2018)
At just six minutes long, Tany Mena (2018) is the kind of short film that could easily slip through the cracks, yet its selection for the Annecy International Animation Festival 2019 suggests it made an impression worth paying attention to. The title translates from Malagasy as "Red Earth", a reference to the distinctive laterite soil of Madagascar, and the film takes Antananarivo, the island nation's capital city, as its subject. Rather than offering a conventional travelogue or a polished but unremarkable portrait of a place, the film approaches the city from the inside out, through the perspectives of the people who actually live there. It is a genuinely unusual piece of work, and one that carries the particular energy you tend to find in projects made with personal conviction rather than commercial intention.
The film is a co-production between Mauritius and Madagascar, directed by Kim Yip Tong, who has built a small but distinctive body of work rooted in the culture and visual landscape of the Indian Ocean region. His earlier short Ebony (2017) also came from his hand, and returning visitors to this blog will know that short-form animation with a strong sense of place is territory I find worth exploring regularly, whether that's something as different in scale and style as The OceanMaker (2014) or the more formally ambitious Josep (2020). What makes Tany Mena stand out within that broader landscape is its structure: rather than a single animator's vision, the film is built from contributions by multiple artists, each bringing their own stop-motion approach to bear on a segment of city life. The result is something closer to a collaborative sketchbook than a traditionally authored short.
Stop-motion animation as a form rewards patience and a certain handmade sensibility, and the multi-artist format here leans into that quality. The cast, in the conventional sense, is not applicable to a film of this nature, since the voices and perspectives belong to the inhabitants of Antananarivo themselves, woven into the fabric of what each artist has chosen to express. There is no studio name attached, no budget figure in the public record, and the film does not feel like it needs either of those things behind it. It is a small film in running time, but it carries the kind of specific local knowledge that bigger, more expensive productions rarely manage to achieve.
A-Z World Movie Tour Madagascar Official Selection of Annecy International Animation Festival 2019 An unconventional stop motion animation portrait of Antananarivo, the Capital city of Madagascar, through the eyes of its inhabitants. It's certainly interesting. Each short segment is created by a different artist who explains their expression. In a way this is why I started this challenge. I know I'm never going to get the chance to visit all of these places in the world but I wanted to hear their voices, understand their cultures, respect their views. This movie does a great job of helping me achieve that
That sense of connection is something I keep coming back to with films like this one. It is easy to treat world cinema, particularly short-form work from countries underrepresented on the festival circuit, as a box to tick or a curiosity to file away. But Tany Mena reminded me why I started looking further afield in the first place. There is something quietly generous about a film that hands the frame over to the people it is actually about, and lets them do the talking in their own way. For me, six minutes never felt more worthwhile. Sometimes the shortest films leave the longest mark.
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)
