“There was a lot of naivety and youthful exuberance”: Usman Riaz on creating The Glassworker, Pakistan’s first hand-drawn animated feature

Miyazaki Hayao’s soaraway animation has spread its influence across continents; one recent germination has been in Pakistan, where a young fan’s debut, The Glassworker, shares not only the master’s allegiance to hand-drawn animation but also his antiwar sentiments. Set, like many of the master’s fables, in a distilled, not-quite-particular land, with notes of the Raj and its militarised successors, it pits young ardour and art against the rule of arms, recounting an ill-starred first love across the tracks between a gruff glass craftsman’s apprentice son and the musician daughter of the local garrison chief, amid rising cross-border conflict.  

Riaz, 33, is himself both animator and musician, and the film is a heart-on-its-sleeve passion project that took him ten years to realise, as he told me by video call. It’s a film of devotion and justly accomplished beauty that also has an emotional richness, surprise and affect.  

You were a musician before turning to make The Glassworker. When did you decide animation was the thing for you?  

Ever since I was a kid I’ve been obsessed with animation and drawing. I was drawing before I ever played music, and even the music I grew up listening to was primarily soundtracks and orchestral works. But I never thought I would grow up to make movies – it was just my escape from the world. 

My father introduced me to the craft of animation when he gave me a book about the history of Bugs Bunny: 50 Years and Only One Grey Hare.  

And then I discovered Studio Ghibli completely by chance through a rented VHS tape. In Pakistan in the early 1990s you could rent a lot of unofficial and pirate VHS tapes, and halfway through this one someone had recorded Kiki’s Delivery Service [1989]. I had no idea what it was, I just knew it was magical. I loved the painted backgrounds, and the way the story was told with the music that kicked in.  

Later there was Princess Mononoke [1997], and I learned the names Miyazaki Hayao and Takahata Isao and their amazing legacy of hand-drawn animation, and that they had also made [the 1974 TV series] Heidi: Girl of the Alps, which I had grown up watching. After that I followed every film that came out.  

That was my animation journey, but in Pakistan there was no hand-drawn animation industry. So, I put that dream aside, started playing percussive guitar, got invited to perform that and my piano works at TED, then invited to study at Berkeley College of Music. But I was still doing art.  

In 2012 I was selected as a TED fellow. That’s where I got to hang out with all these pioneers and great minds, and I noticed they were pursuing what they loved and operating on this primal passion without worrying what the world had to say.  

That put me on the path to making this movie. I started carrying around a portfolio with all my drawings and ideas for The Glassworker. I begged the Ted organisers to let me speak at Ted X Toyko, because the Japanese would understand what I was trying to do. And in July 2015 I gave that talk, and an event manager [for Studio Ghibli], Hashida Shin, invited me to the studio.  

You grow up watching the documentaries about Ghibli and seeing the studio in books and pictures, but nothing prepares you for actually walking in, seeing the phone booth and the wooden Totoro and the animators’ desks upstairs. Miyazaki was there, but working on [the 2018 short] Boro the Caterpillar for the Ghibli Museum. And maybe they were trying to get rid of me, but they gave me some wonderful advice and said “if you really want to make this movie, you should start your own studio.” 

That’s a tall order on top of making your first feature.  

There was a lot of naivety and youthful exuberance. I did not know that I would be spending ten, 11 years – a third of my life – on this project. 

Independent studios like Cartoon Saloon or even Ghibli usually take four or five years to make their movies. In the sixth year I realised ours was going to take longer. In the seventh year it grew pretty dark – we were also filming a behind-the-scenes documentary and gathering terabytes of footage with no end in sight. But there were always milestones, such as a work in progress screening at the Annecy animation festival; light at the end of the tunnel.  

But it was hard. I had a remarkable team and we all worked very hard but I drew all the storyboards myself, because I had a firm idea what I wanted. So I figured out the layers we needed for the parallax in the storyboard, the camera pans, some of the keyframe animation I would do in the storyboards too. And once I was done with that I shifted to the animation and assisting all the other departments.  

Slowly my youthful exuberance was replaced by the reality that there’s no real film industry in Pakistan. There are wonderful auteurs and great work being made – there’s Saim Sadiq, who made the critically acclaimed Joyland [2022], or In Flames [2023], by Zarrar Kahn – but there are only about 52 screens in the entire vast country. The TV industry is much bigger.  

At the end of the day, regardless of the talent or enthusiasm, an industry needs money to support it. So, I said okay, let’s make this movie to show it’s possible. Then hopefully people will want to make things like this. And then it could start a movement. That was the dream. I don’t know how far along it is to reality, but that’s what I’m trying to do. 

The particular story you wanted to tell is a universal one, a love story that straddles the extremes of fine art and war.  

I wrote the first draft when I was 22 or 23. I wanted to capture the emotions I felt growing up in Pakistan in a post-9/11 world, seeing on the news what is happening in neighbouring countries and worrying the world is falling apart. But also finding reasons to keep living your life. As a child, you keep going. But when you get older and look back you realise that was a strange way to grow up.  

That inspired the story in both Vincent and Alliz’s characters. I feel I’m a craftsman with my drawings and animation but also a musician, so I put aspects of me in both.  

Later I met Geoffrey Wexler, who had been a producer at Studio Ghibli and came on board as a consultant, and he put me in touch with a wonderful writer from the UK, Moya O’Shea, and both came to Pakistan to experience the culture and help me refine the story. But it was really an analysis of the way I grew up.  

I didn’t set it in Pakistan though because I wanted the themes to be approachable and universal. I didn’t want any political commentary, just to show the lives of these characters and how in war and conflict it’s the people and their actual lives that suffer; and how our inherent humanity comes out in the arts. 

You have English- and Urdu-language versions of the film.  

We ended up making the English version first, even though I’d started the project in Urdu, because so many international collaborators were coming on board and we decided it would be easier to get the English version done first.  

That’s when we also refined the screenplay and found our voice cast. To stay true to the spirit of the film we focused on primarily British actors of South Asian descent: so Art Malik, Sacha Dhawan and Anjli Mohindra for our leads. We recorded them in 2022, when we were still working with a lot of storyboards and rough animation, and their performances actually influenced the animation. We had to make changes to fit their delivery in takes where it was better than I had envisioned it.  

Then we went back to the Urdu script and tweaked it to fit the English mouth movements. It felt like coming full circle, perfect bookends, starting and finishing the project in Urdu.  

How was the film received in Pakistan?  

We released it in July 2024 and had a much longer run than predicted. No one had made a film like this before [in Pakistan] so no one knew what to expect. Some feared it would be too adult or young-adult than the children’s animation coming out in Pakistan, but audiences were more savvy and enjoyed it quite a bit.  

Then the Pakistan Film Academy selected it to represent Pakistan at the Oscars, and we made it as far as the shortlist for animation and the long-list for international feature film, which was remarkable for a first feature. And I’m very grateful for everything because it led me to find management in LA and hopefully makes the journey to the next film a little bit easier.  

I want to explore the themes of The Glassworker a little bit further. I spoke before about Kiki’s Delivery Service – that’s the film I want to make now, something that can inspire and delight. It won’t just show the harsh reality of life with a hidden beauty but the fun and adventure, with a fantastical story. I want to explore mythology, especially South Asian mythology, a lot more. And hopefully I’ve learned a few things that will allow me to make it faster and it won’t take another ten years. Six – that’s the dream.  

► The Glassworker is in UK cinemas 19 September.