The Glassworker: Pakistan’s first hand-drawn animated feature wears its Studio Ghibli inspirations on its sleeve

A ten-year labour of love, Usman Riaz’s first feature is also the first hand-drawn animated feature from Pakistan – a country that only made its first animated feature of any fashion (Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy’s Three Brave) in 2015. More remarkably, given that context, it needs no special pleading: it’s an accomplished film of beauty, complexity, sweep and feeling fully commensurate with Riaz’s devotion to its making, and a tribute to art and young love against the tides of time and war.

No one will miss the animation’s debt to the works of Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki Hayao: he has clearly imbibed that influence, graphically and conceptually, and wears it on his sleeve. (Nor does the film’s marketing shy from the connection, with its wide-eyed, backlit characters earnestly gazing to the horizon.) But the film is no pastiche; Riaz has his own tale to tell, a notch less fabulist than classic Miyazaki, more romantic, and with a temporal cross-cutting fluency beyond any Ghibli film except perhaps Takahata Isao’s Only Yesterday (1991), with its reminiscences of early youth from the vantage of early adulthood.

Set in Waterford, an outpost town of a fictional nation locked in a border war, it tells the story of Vincent Oliver, a third-generation glassblower living with his father, Tomas, in a studio over prized white riverside sand, guarded by their very own djinn. Preparing for his first exhibit of his glass sculptures, Vincent comes across a letter from his lost love, Alliz, the rereading of which slips us back to his apprenticeship, when she first entered their workshop and gazed in wonder at their art (and caught a glass rose he was about to drop). 

She herself is a talented and devoted violinist, and they strike up a quick and easy rapport, but they are from different sides of the tracks, their fathers serving different orders. Tomas, a widower whose wife sacrificed herself to her glassblowing talent, lays down discipline to his dutiful home-schooled son while exacerbating their marginalisation with his obdurate pacifism. Alliz’s father is Colonel Amano, newly posted to Waterford’s garrison and exuding the pomp of a commander in war.

Though the film embraces the old-fashioned star-crossed romance, it’s driven by a surprising emotional realism. There are few heroes and villains. (Admittedly, Alliz’s mother is thinly characterised as a sour snob.) The young lovers are gorgeous but not above rash words and follies. Amano is a tyrant but also a soldier of duty and valour, a man of aesthetic refinement but moral complacency; one of his charges, Malik, another of Alliz’s suitors, is also both bully and saviour. Tomas’s story arc is perhaps the most affecting, the uncompromising patriarch enfeebled, forced to surrender pride and more for his son. There’s a strong evocation of generational bequeathal, sins and sacrifices all in the mix.

While the film’s bold, primary character designs and iridescent backdrops are pure Ghibli – Riaz has spoken of working his way through the studio’s art books, and finds many places to evoke beauty both natural and human-made – its backdrop of nebulous, escalating martial menace has touchstones in Miyazaki’s more battle-torn worlds, from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) to Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), with their dark aerial assaults and pyrotechnic terrors; The Glassworker also features sinister, vaguely otherworldly aircraft chewing up the skies. 

There’s a particular resonance with The Wind Rises (2014) and its tragedy of artistic ambition corrupted by war’s looming convulsions – Tomas is blackmailed to produce “quicksilver rectifiers” to guide the army’s new amphibious airships. But while you could read here a distillation of life in Pakistan’s militarised society, Riaz’s film is more historically abstract, and speaks equally of British-born imperial rank and patriarchy, or (via the Ghibli imprint) its Far Eastern equivalent.

The film’s inclusion of a djinn, resident of a cave beside the glassworks, is a particularly light local inflection – almost an afterthought, certainly not given dramatic emphasis. It adds to the film’s visual originality, though, alongside the colourful glass-making motif: where Miyazaki intimates a spirit life in the movements of the wind, The Glassworker does so through light itself. (The glassworking is conveyed beautifully; the end credits acknowledge consultation with Peter Layton’s London workshop.)

The English-language dialogue, richly voice-acted by a South Asian British cast – including Sacha Dhawan, Anjli Mohindra and Art Malik – is the film’s original soundtrack; an Urdu dub has since also been made.

► The Glassworker is in UK cinemas 19 September.