KARACHI: The premiere of the latest Pakistani animated film Tick Tock was held at a local cinema on Thursday where the cast and crew were present to celebrate its release.

An animated adventure of history buffs Hassan and Daanya, the premise of Tick Tock is of travelling back in time to major historical events in the subcontinent and later on in Pakistan; the movie aims to flesh out real-life historical characters including A.K. Fazlul Huq and Fatima Jinnah. One of the events the heroes go back to is March 23, 1940, and so the movie was released to audiences on Pakistan Day.

Director Omer Hassan spoke to Dawn about the journey of working on an animated film which he said was far from being easy. “There is a lot of hard work involved and [it] is a painstaking and tedious job. One needs a lot of patience as a lot of things are out of your control. In animation your control is limited to the voiceovers; you have to rely a lot on the animation team for them to manifest your vision as a director which takes months and years.”

The cast of Tick Tock includes Ahsan Khan as Hassan, Maria Memon as Daanya, Alyy Khan as KK and Ghulam Mohiuddin as the villain Gobo.

Most of the characters were based on the actors themselves and so were inspired by their real personalities. So the dialogues were also written keeping the actors in mind.

The writer of the movie, Omair Alavi, spoke about how important it was to encourage Pakistani cinema and in particular animated movies. “All the work done in the movie has been done in Pakistan which was a great challenge. Rendering in animation is a tough job and in Pakistan we hardly have any facilities as compared to the rest of the world. But we still managed to complete this film in a little over two years and the message in Tick Tock will resonate with all Pakistanis.”

Published in Dawn, March 24th, 2018