By: Lucas Raven
Usman Riaz didn’t have a studio, a pipeline, or a precedent. So he built all three by hand, one frame at a time — and somehow still finds time to be self-effacing about it.
There is a particular kind of person who, upon discovering that the thing they want to do has never been done before in their country, decides this is a reason to proceed rather than a reason to stop. He is that kind of person, which is either wildly inspiring or faintly terrifying, depending on how your own Tuesday is going.
The Glassworker — hand-drawn, ten-plus years in the making, produced by a studio (Mano Animation) that Riaz essentially had to invent before he could use it — is Pakistan’s first hand-drawn animated feature. Not “one of.” The first. When he sat down to make it, there was no pipeline to plug into, no generation of veteran in-betweeners to poach from a rival studio down the street, no institutional muscle memory to lean on. There was, as he tells it, a fairly small problem: he wanted to make the film, and the industry required to make it did not yet exist. So — and this is the part that should feel more dramatic than it apparently did to him — he built it. Studio, pipeline, trained artists, the works, concurrently with the film itself, like assembling the plane mid-flight and somehow also learning to fly it and also storyboarding the in-flight movie.
That last detail matters, because Riaz storyboarded the entire film himself, frame by imagined frame, before a single department got its hands on it. This is less “director’s tool” and more “load-bearing act of authorship” — the boards were where he worked out performance, lighting, rhythm, atmosphere, all of it, long before the drawings existed for real. Which tracks with a filmmaker who describes his relationship to detail less as decoration and more as evidence: every object in a room is meant to be doing something, quietly, whether or not the audience ever consciously clocks it.
On influence, Usman is refreshingly unbothered by the usual anxieties. Studio Ghibli, yes, obviously — but also live-action cinema, classical painting, architecture, photography, music, and the specific quality of light at a specific time of day that he happened to notice once and never quite let go of. He’s not interested in copying the surface of things he loves; he wants to know why they moved him, which is the kind of answer that sounds vaguely insufferable coming from most people and somehow doesn’t from him, possibly because he immediately undercuts it by admitting he mostly just wonders whether a shot works.
On restraint, he’s borderline evangelical. People, he points out, rarely say what they’re actually feeling — so his characters don’t either. A held gaze, a hesitation before a line, a hand that won’t quite settle: this is where the film’s emotional weather lives, not in the big gestures. It is, notably, the opposite instinct of a medium that technically allows you to make anyone do anything, which is precisely why he thinks the restraint matters. Animation hands you total control, he says, and the discipline is in not abusing it.
On AI, and this is where the interview earns its keep, He draws a line that’s less culture-war talking point and more craftsman’s principle: he made The Glassworker entirely by hand, with zero AI assistance, at a moment in animation history when that fact is starting to read as a statement rather than a default. He’s not a Luddite about it — after a decade-plus of independent production, he says he’d happily take any tool that makes the grind easier.
But there’s a difference, in his accounting, between a tool that helps you make something and a tool that makes it for you, and he’s fairly insistent about staying on the correct side of that particular ledger. He still wants his hand on the pencil. Make of that what you will in 2026.
Our celebrated visionary is, admirably, resistant to being crowned anything. Asked about his place in a supposed new generation of animators redefining the medium, he mostly just seems surprised anyone’s using the word “generation” about him at all — he’s usually preoccupied with whether the next drawing works. But he does light up, genuinely, at the idea that animation no longer has to originate from the same three or four places on the map.
A hand-drawn Pakistani feature travelling the international festival circuit is, to him, less a personal triumph than a proof of concept: the stories were always out there; the infrastructure just hadn’t caught up yet.
As for what’s next: bigger worlds, more mythology, more of the fantastical — territory he insists isn’t actually new for him, just deferred, since fantasy is what pulled him into filmmaking in the first place. But he’s careful to note that spectacle, for him, is only ever in service of the human being standing underneath it. Scale up the world all you like; the thing he’s actually interested in doesn’t get any bigger than a person.
Usman describes finishing a film — any film — as something close to a miracle, and making a second one as asking for a second miracle, which is either the most Pakistani-independent-filmmaker sentence ever spoken or the most honest thing anyone in this industry has said all year. Possibly both.
Given that he already built an entire national animation industry as a side effect of wanting to tell one story, it seems fair to take him at his word that there’s more where that came from.
