Hassan and Dania, two school-going kids voiced-over by Ahsan Khan and Maria Memon are having a wild, carefree day after stumbling through their teacher’s time portal. Zigzagging through history, they dropkick hooligans kidnapping Fazlul Haq in 1940, pop up to save hockey captain Islahuddin Siddiqui and his team in 1978, drop by Mohatta Palace to have tea with Fatima Jinnah in 1966, and then whizz back to London in 1894 to aid young Mahomedali Jinnahbhai catch a purse-stealing criminal (obviously time, space and geography hold no barriers for these two).

The kids are brash and plucky, but the heroes of history are sweet, everyday people. Fatima Jinnah misses her brother and Hassan becomes chummy with the yet-to-be Quaid-i-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah, nicknaming him “MJ”. But do these spontaneous, sporadic events even lead somewhere?

The story ties up and becomes somewhat coherent when Hassan and Dania land on May 28, 1998 — the day Pakistan conducted five nuclear tests in Chagai, Balochistan — and get stuck in an interminable time loop.

Tick Tock, written by film reviewer-turned-screenwriter Omair Alavi and director Omar Hasan, uses every time-travel kink in fiction without logic or explanation to zest up the pace. This Hollywood-inspired tempo is imported from any Michael Bay movie, and includes tell-tale signs of divorce between lucidity and lunacy.

Animated film Tick Tock’s sole redeeming feature fails to cover up a series of compromises that date back to its original concept as a web series

Astonishingly, the madcap velocity succeeds in keeping one’s attention while the rest of the film’s ambitions burn to cinder. A faint whiff of Tick Tock’s potential lingers in the air, while the fumes continuously sting one’s eyes (the animation quality is actually responsible for the pain in one’s eyes, but more on that later).

In retrospect, the whiff and the fumes are part of the parcel. One can’t exist without the other. To get a fleeting glimpse of triumph, one has to brave immense visual pain.

Tick Tock’s sole redeeming feature — the second half of its screenplay — comes after a series of compromises that date back to the concept’s origin as a web series. Circumstances (evidently, a lack of budget) coerced the creators to edit whatever animation they had produced into a feature-length presentation, irrespective of narrative inconsistencies.

Taking a ‘what-if’ scenario into consideration, rather than making do with below-par production, producers Sana Tauseef and Zahir Ali could have upgraded their 3D models and then re-imported the available animation on to newly made characters. The process is gruelling, but not difficult. Even a slight boost in quality would have worked wonders.

As presented, Tick Tock’s low-grade models are best suited for previsualisation and animatic works (i.e. reference animation and storyboards). Facial animation is limited to basic eye and jaw-movement; muscle deformation is nonexistent (the arm and leg joints bring memories of inflatable Hit Me dolls from the ’80s); texturing, the look of skin, architecture and foliage, is just as bad. Models like these are designed from scratch in hours. In comparison, a “respectably designed” character for television takes days to make.

Astonishingly, the madcap velocity succeeds in keeping one’s attention preoccupied while the rest of the film’s ambitions burn to cinder. A faint whiff of Tick Tock’s potential lingers in the air, while the fumes continuously sting one’s eyes (the animation quality is actually responsible for the pain in one’s eyes).

These upgrades would have delayed Tick Tock’s release — and that’s a good thing; the added time could’ve been an opportunity to re-tinker and add coherence to the storyline. In its present state, the first hour’s episodic nature sticks out like an obnoxious carbuncle. Leftover plot threads drift freely until forcibly linked into an all-embracing story arc.

Hassan and Dania, like most protagonists in Pakistani cinema, are bland manifestations of superficial characterisations. They bicker, kick-butt and spoon-feed the story’s progress in case the audience gets lost. What they don’t do is tell us about themselves.

All works of animation — whether short-form, episodic or feature — drive stories by taking their characters on a literal and metaphorical journey, where physical actions lead to mental growth and vice-versa. As a result, the audience sympathises when people on screen are snarled in inescapable predicaments. In short: we care, but only when they make us care in the first place.

The screenplay touches these aspects only at the very end by unravelling Tick Tock’s villain Gobo (Ghulam Mohiuddin) and the children’s time-travelling teacher KK (Alyy Khan). Even this late touch of astuteness is a good thing because Tick Tock needs all the help it can get. In desperate times, some saving grace is better than no grace at all.

Published in Dawn, ICON, April 1st, 2018