The Glassworker (Riaz, 2025)

The Glassworker straddles the fence between knock-off and homage.

I think it falls on the wrong side of that divide. Show the picture above to a dozen cinephiles, and I suspect at least ten of them will wrongly identify is as being from Studio Ghibli or a Miyazaki film. How many would guess the characters are supposed to Pakistani?

The boy is Vincent, the son of a glassworker. Vincent’s father, Tomas, is derisively called a pacificist since he will not allow his son to join the town’s junior military supporters or hang out with Ailiz, the daughter of the town’s colonel. But Ailiz plays the violin, and her love of doing so both reminds the father of his deceased wife and his own devotion to his craft. When Tomas is given a choice between using his skills to help the military or being enlisted, he chooses the lesser of two evils with the condition that Vincent be allowed to learn the family trade.

There is nothing wrong with the animation here, excepting that it robs a rather generic story of its most individualistic characteristic: its setting. Perhaps that is by design, attempting to make an anti-war movie for kids as apolitical as an anti-war movie can be. The film’s marketing, though, makes so much of the fact that it is the first film of its kind created entirely in Pakistan, that one wonders if we are meant to applaud the film itself of the achievement of making it.

The Glassworker won the Audience Award at the Asian World Film Festival, so there is some evidence that audiences connect with the film. While I don’t quite share that sentiment, I do think the film is worth watching for its its message about the power of art and music to give purpose to our lives, even when we are surrounded by those who see and purpose only military might and political power.