Hair Love
2019 · 6m · USA
Directed by Matthew A. Cherry, Everett Downing Jr., Bruce W. Smith
Genres: animation, drama, family
Seven-year-old Zuri tries to style her thick natural hair using her mother's video tutorials, but when her father has to step in for the first time, the two fumble through it together — with a quietly devastating reveal of why mom isn't there to help.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to applaud this for its politics, which is fine, but what actually makes Hair Love work is that it refuses the sentimental trap—the father's incompetence is played as comedy AND tenderness without winking at the audience, and that tonal restraint is genuinely radical for a film this deliberately message-driven.
The film sits confidently in a lineage of intimate family animation—there's a clear debt to Pixar's emotional grammar—but Cherry and team earned their Oscar by understanding that restraint in dialogue and precision in gesture can say more about presence and love than any voiceover ever could.
The entire film hinges on one choice: letting the father's fumbling with the comb be genuinely awkward and real instead of cartoonishly exaggerated, which somehow makes both the humor and the devastating final beat land with the weight of something much larger.
Reviews
An instantly engaging — if somewhat emotionally manipulative — way to untangle and potentially reshape a number of African American stereotypes.
Lively, moving and heartwarming, Hair Love is a celebration of both individuality and racial roots set against the backdrop of a healthy father daughter relationship.
Festivals
- Academy Awards 2020, Best Animated Short Film (Winner)