While much has been made in the press about this or that project being the very first animated movie to be made in South Africa, a small low-budget movie named 'Tengers' seems to have beaten them all to the goal posts...

Described by its own creator as "'Tsotsi' meets 'Wallace & Gromit'", 'Tengers' (as in Gautengers) is a clay-mation movie set in contemporary Johannesburg which tells the story of an Everyman White guy named Rob Mabene.

"Mabene?" one character asks.

"He changed his surname to avoid reverse discrimination," another answers. (His real name was Rob Bainks, geddit?)

Rob is an unemployed writer who wins a Lotto scratch "cash for life" card prize. This would seem to be the solution to all of his problems, except that he becomes convinced — in typical paranoid Gauteng fashion — that the Lotto people are out to kill him so that they don't have to pay out all the prize money.

Fearing for his life, he goes underground by hanging out with the unemployed and homeless of a crime-ridden Johannesburg, a city in which constant machinegun fire can be heard in the background whilst every florist in the city seems to have been converted to a gun shop — no doubt to meet new increased demand!

Welcome to the cynical, bitter and (yes) funny world of 'Tengers', the brainchild of Pretoria Technikon Film and Television School graduate and writer, director, animator and editor Michael J. Rix. This low-budget animated film began life eight long years ago when Rix storyboarded the film and began the long, studious process of bringing to life the "politically challenged" clay-mation characters and world of 'Tengers', one digital frame at a time.

Rix's story of making the film — he did it in his spare time whilst working on "day jobs" that paid the rent — is almost the topic of a movie in itself, one in which the hard-working and dedicated lone figure makes it against all odds.

He didn’t write the handful of catchy pop songs featured in the soundtrack, but the rest of what you see on screen during 'Tengers' is all the work of one man: Michael J. Rix — a pretty impressive accomplishment!

The soundtrack is, however, only temporary. During our interview he dropped some famous celebrity names who were apparently interested in supplying their talents to the final 'Tengers' audio track. But attracting celebrity names at this stage seems much easier than attracting a local distributor for the film. If it isn’t Leon Schuster, then it would seem that film distributors aren’t all that interested. However, Ster-Kinekor finally snatched up the film and it is slotted for release on 19 October.

'Tengers' isn’t Schuster; in fact it’s a whole lot better than any Schuster movie that ever saw the light of a cinema projector. Smart and clever (it has one of our favourite 'Hamlet' gags of all time), 'Tengers' is a social satire that takes a topical look at the crime and socio-political situation in South Africa.

"What is sad about this project is how everyone remarks that the crime situation in the country hasn’t improved at all in the eight years since I started on the project," Rix tells us. "In fact it has only gotten worse."

Anyone expecting the sort of Hollywood production values seen in films such as 'Chicken Run' and 'Wallace & Gromit' would be disappointed. The clay-mation in 'Tengers' is crude and it's easy to spot the fingerprints where the clay figurines were manipulated. But the movie has it where it counts: by the time the ending rolls around it's hard not to be emotionally affected by onscreen proceedings, no mean feat for an animated movie — something which most South Africans usually dismiss as being "for kids"…