Director: Usman Riaz
Screenplay: Moya O’Shea
Producers: Khizer Riaz, Manuel Cristóbal
Starring: Art Malik, Sacha Dawan, Anjili Mohindra, Tony Jayawardena
Year: 2024
Country: Pakistan
BBFC Certification: 12A
Duration: 99 mins
Ten years in the making and a milestone in Pakistan’s animation industry as the country’s first hand-drawn animated feature, The Glassworker is certainly a labour of love for director Usman Riaz. Its existence feels like something of a minor miracle and that sense of wonder and excitement is folded into the viewing experience for animation enthusiasts. We need films like The Glassworker but they can also be heartbreaking, and not necessarily in the fashion intended. There’s no doubt that The Glassworker is an exceptionally beautiful film, its Miyazaki-inspired art style filling every frame with ravishing detail and striking backdrops. But like the artisanal creations of the titular artist, The Glassworker’s plot feels so fragile that it could be shattered by a light sneeze.
The Glassworker follows the story of Vincent, apprentice glassblower to his father Tomas, an overbearing but highly principled man whose pacifist values make him and his son pariahs during a wartime surge of patriotism. Things are complicated even further when Vincent falls in love with Alliz, the daughter of the unscrupulous Colonel Amano. The Glassworker jumps backwards and forwards in time as it tells its melodramatic tale of childhood, first love and the devastating effects of war.
I imagine one thing a glassworker must never be is heavy-handed but the plot points here are so hackneyed and the dialogue lands with such a clunk that you can practically hear the glass objects in the background chinking against their shelves with every line. One unfortunate issue that no doubt affected my assessment was that The Glassworker was only available to me in an English dub. Whether the original Urdu dialogue sounded any more elegant is up for question but the cast of the English dub sound thoroughly bored, which is detrimental to such melodramatic material. Emotional beats are missed again and again because of the flat line readings, which completely undermines the necessary connection between the audience and the material. Tragedy can seem eerily robotic when presented with such distancing indifference.
Studio Ghibli is an ambitious but laudable watermark for which to shoot but, like many previous works inspired by the studio, if a film can’t quite reach even the outskirts of Ghibli’s quality then it ultimately feels like a mistake to evoke them at all. In the case of The Glassworker, Moyo O’Shea’s screenplay, at least in the English translation, is laden with cliches and expository lines that no human being would ever speak. As a lifelong lover of animation, I can’t help but feel some affection towards a film that has tried so hard and achieved so much on a visual level but with such feeble storytelling, I sadly can’t recommend The Glassworker beyond its glistening surface sheen.
Dazzler Media presents The Glassworker in UK and Irish cinemas from 19 September.
Trailer: https://youtu.be/JN_lme43KSk
Social Media tags
#TheGlassworker
Facebook: @DazzlerFilms
Instagram: @DazzlerMedia
X: @DazzlerMedia