Outlook Mixtape: Making anime history and a singer's secret father

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Usman Riaz grew up in Karachi with a passion for Japanese cartoons, but he never dreamed he could become a hand-drawn animator because the industry didn’t exist in Pakistan. So Usman turned to music, getting a scholarship to Berklee College in the US. Then in 2015, after being invited to Studio Ghibli in Tokyo, a leap of faith propelled Usman to build his own animation studio, and with a team of local animators he created Pakistan’s first ever hand-drawn animated feature film. The Glassworker, Usman’s homage to the anime films of his childhood, was longlisted for the 2025 Oscars. Sarah Joyce spent the first few years of her life in Pakistan with her British parents and siblings. When she was 11 her mother told her that her biological father wasn't the man she had always called "Dad", instead he was the family's Pakistani cook. Sarah wrote music to make sense of her past and turned her experiences into a surprise hit record under the name Rumer. Soon Rumer was performing at the White House in the US and was an exciting new artist on the scene. But behind closed doors she was suffering with the pressures of fame. She left the music industry completely and spent time in nature before venturing into music again, releasing her latest album In Session. Irishman Denis Mulcahy emigrated from County Cork to the United States in 1962 and ended up becoming an expert with the NYPD bomb squad. Watching the Troubles back home in Northern Ireland, Denis and his friends hatched a plan to give children caught up in the violence, six weeks respite in the United States over the summer. Over four decades, the programme known as Project Children, brought together 23,000 Catholic and Protestant kids from either side of the divide, helping to inoculate them from the sectarianism tearing their homeland apart. Among the first group of children brought over to the US in 1975 were nine-year-old Kevin Brady and eleven-year-old John Cheevers. For them, that first visit to upstate New York would not only shape them as individuals but alter the course of their lives. Presenter: Saskia Collette Producer: June Christie Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp +44 330 678 2707 (Photo: Cassette tape. Credit: Getty Images)