Review: The Glassworker makes history in stunning fashion

Every movie is a sort of miracle. There's so much that has to happen for a movie to make it to the screen, so many people who have to put their time and effort into it, resources that need to be acquired and effectively used, a host of other things that need to align. Kismet, luck, fate, whatever you want to call it. It's hard to make anything. It's hard to make magic.

Usman Riaz's The Glassworker feels like even more of a miracle than most movies. I've been following the film's journey to the screen on social media for a while now. It's the first-ever hand-drawn movie to come from Pakistan, and has been a labor of love for Riaz and his Mano Animation Studios for almost a decade. Finally getting to watch it, I just wanted to cry. I was so excited to finally be seeing the fruit of this studio's labors, to be watching something that's historic, that will forever have its place in animation history, and in the history of Pakistani cinema. It makes my heart feel like it's going to explode (in a good way, naturally).

How lucky, then, that the movie is really, really wonderful. From the opening moments, I knew I was in good hands -- it's amazing to look at, and the music is just as gorgeous. And then it made me cry, again and again, as it wove its lovely story and cast that magic spell that -- really -- only hand-drawn animation can.

The Glassworker wears its influences proudly on its sleeve. If you take a glance at it, you'd be forgiven for wondering if it's a Studio Ghibli film you somehow haven't seen. The animation here is simply gorgeous, and is clearly inspired by the greats of Japanese animation. There's so much colorful, beautiful movement, exquisite attention to detail. Our protagonist is, as you. might guess, a glassworker, and the sequences of glassworking are among the film's most visually gob-smacking. Glass requires delicate, intricate work (much like animation), and the way it's rendered here is so detailed and fine: the glow of the kiln, the heft of the tools, the colors, the sculpting, the lovely way the light suffuses the final product. Equally impressive are the wartime set-pieces with all their fire and bombast: explosions and flame and rubble as terror rains down from the sky. There are some truly haunting images here, some for their gravity, more for their beauty. 

The film's setting is a pleasant amalgam of various influences and cultures. The town itself looks vaguely European, but the marketplace looks more Middle Eastern. The characters' clothes and the food they eat feel like they're drawn from all corners of the world, but they also all fit together. I really enjoyed just looking at the background characters and how they were styled.

At the core of the story is a Romeo and Juliet (or really, more like Noah and Allie from The Notebook)-type romance. Vincent is the son of the town's pacifist glassworker, considered lower-class and uneducated. He doesn't go to school, instead learning everything he needs from his father as he prepares to someday take over the business. Alliz is the daughter of an army colonel who's stationed in the town for its advantageous position, and for the sake of his family's safety. She's a talented violinist and a student at the ritzy academy in town. And she's strictly off-limits to Vincent, despite them kindling an easy friendship when they cross paths early in the film.

Told largely through flashbacks (with a frame story of Vincent preparing for an art exhibition, and reading a letter Alliz wrote him years ago), the story is pretty classic and clean. The characters are clear-cut, and the tensions between Vincent and Alliz feel natural, maybe a bit obvious. They have different views of war and the military due to their different upbringings, and these lead to some testy exchanges, some soul-searching. What I really love about their dynamic is the way that, even in their disagreements, they push each other to be more, to be better, to create. By the film's end, I was thinking about the famous Rent lyric: "The opposite of war isn't peace: it's creation." That very well could be the thesis of The Glassworker, a film that sees art as an act of courage in the face of the horrors of the world, another way to fight against the destruction of war.

There are so many frames and moments in this that are just stunning, and not always in ways you'd expect. Late in the film, Vincent has a crisis of character that plays out with some horror-tinged moments that I found pretty shocking and effective. And the film, while quite grounded, occasionally has glimmers of the more fantastical, thanks to the Djinn who lives on the beach beneath the glassworks. That Djinn, depicted mostly as a kinetic, bouncy light, ends up playing a curious role in the way the film wraps up. The ending left me a little confounded but still warm. It's something I'm going to need to sit with and digest more to figure out how I feel about it.

I'm so glad this movie exists, so glad we have this amazing studio producing incredible animation in Pakistan. And I'm so glad that Pakistan submitted it for the Oscars! Animated films face an uphill battle in the category (as in most categories), but what an honor just to be the submission.

The Glassworker has its California premiere at the Lightbox Expo in Pasadena on October 25 at 10:00pm. It doesn't have US distribution in place yet, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time. If you want to learn more about the film in the meantime, Mano has a twelve-episode BTS series about the making of the film on their YouTube page.