None
EN
The Glassworker: Pakistan’s first hand-drawn animated feature wears its Studio Ghibli inspirations on its sleeve
['Adam Nayman', 'Tom Charity', 'Leigh Singer']
BFI | Features and reviews
(Nor does the film’s marketing shy from the connection, with its wide-eyed, backlit characters earnestly gazing to the horizon.)
The Glassworker (2024)Though the film embraces the old-fashioned star-crossed romance, it’s driven by a surprising emotional realism.
Tomas’s story arc is perhaps the most affecting, the uncompromising patriarch enfeebled, forced to surrender pride and more for his son.
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.
['art'
'fantastic'
'ghibli'
'light'
'films'
'love'
'miyazaki'
'glassworker'
'film'
'riazs'
'review'
'tomas'
'wind']