Time travel, clones, a meeting with our founders …Tick Tock is a sci-fi animated thriller for kids. The movie is about two teens, Hassan (voiced by Ahsan Khan) and Dania (Maria Memon), who travel through a time warp where they join their teacher KK (Alyy Khan), an expert on time travel, to stop the evil Gobo (Ghulam Mohiuddin) from distorting the timeline of our country’s history.

The story takes us back in time to some crucial moments of our history — meeting a young Muhammad Ali Jinnah Poonja in 1890s London, welcoming back home the 1978 Hockey World Cup champions team, the site where our scientists carried out the nuclear blasts at Chaghi in 1998 … the story was spun in a way that kept me glued, wanting to find out what happens next.

Preachy? Not at all. In fact, I got to know parts of history in a way that it got me turn to Google to find out more after the movie. I wish my teacher had known how to make the subject interesting back in school and I would have known more about how the Quaid decided to pursue a career as barrister.

Although the encounter presented in the movie is a fictional one, it did give me an insight as to the kind of mindset that people with a strong resolve have. Plus, I was more than captivated listening to one of the characters deciphering the mechanics of time travel for Hassan and Dania. It took me back to when after school I would sit and do my books of puzzles, keen on solving one mystery after the other or make buildings and robots out of Lego and other blocks with my brother. Why do we not get taught quantum physics in school?

The script and screenplay is penned by Omair Alavi and Omar Hassan, with the latter directing the film as well. The movie, however, lacks in certain areas of animation — the characters would have been more engaging had their facial expressions been worked on more. Maria Memon’s voiceover needed better modulation. Sound editing was amiss towards the end. It does not pay to rush the screening of a film production. Had the details been worked over better, teething issues could have been done away with. The violence too could have been toned down since it is an animation meant for children.

However, watching this movie made me realise how well we can script movies and TV series that are intelligent and are made keeping in mind that those watching it will be able to understand abstract and stimulating ideas.

The best part? It is entirely different from the sensational stuff we see on mainstream TV in Pakistan. Tick Tock deserves to have a TV or web series, of course with better character development and animation.

Published in Dawn, Young World, March 31st, 2018