Dear Basketball
2017 · 5m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Glen Keane
Genres: animation, biography, sports
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
Kobe Bryant's inspirational poem 'Dear Basketball' is transformed into an animated short with original music composed by John Williams.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a celebrity vanity project dressed up as poetry—the kind of thing that makes you roll your eyes at first, then realize Keane actually weaponized Disney sentimentality against the whole retirement-speech apparatus to say something genuinely unsettling about legacy and ego.
Glen Keane's brushwork in service of Bryant's verse creates a deliberate formal tension between athletic grace and the balletic language of farewell; the John Williams score anchors it in the lineage of sports cinema as modern myth, though the film knows exactly how much that tradition is worth examining.
The decision to animate Kobe's words rather than simply illustrate them—letting the line weight and abstraction of Keane's ink respond rhythmically to each phrase—transforms what could've been promotional material into something that actually earns its emotional weight through a single, rigorous formal choice.