Skip to main content

Watch the Oscar-Winning Animated Short “Hair Love”

African-American hair has been making headlines for the last few years, usually because another black student has been deemed in violation of the dress code for sporting braids, dreads, or a natural afro.

This year’s Oscar-winning animated short, "Hair Love," about an African-American dad’s attempt to stay on top of his 5-year-old daughter’s abundant locks, is the sweet alternative to these upsetting news stories.

Little Zuri’s dad, Stephen, doesn’t have to battle clueless or unfair administrators on his daughter’s behalf, but he does need to gain the upper hand on an adversary with whose ways he’s unfamiliar. (His own hair is styled in tidy dreadlocks.)

It’s implied that tending to Zuri’s hair is not exactly something he volunteered for, and indeed we learn that the task was previously the domain of her mother

In desperation, Stephen seeks advice in the form of YouTube videos, finding a plethora, as did filmmaker and former NFL wide receiver Matthew A Cherry, who referenced some of his actual inspirations in the film, like the viral video of DJ Hines’ attempt to contain daughter Chloe’s thick hair with a ponytail holder, below.

Cherry raised the necessary funding on Kickstarter, and completed the film in about six weeks after posting a call for collaborators on Twitter:

Any 3D artists follow me? I got an Oscar worthy short film idea to go with this image. Get at me 

As Cherry points out in the trailer for "Hair Love"’s accompanying book, Zuri’s robust, kinky curls—almost a third character according to illustrator Vashti Harrison—are a marvelous excuse to bust stereotypes by placing an involved, African-American dad front and center.

The tale has also won a lot of fans in the cancer survivor community for its deft portrayal of the effects of Zuri’s mom’s illness and recovery on the family.

Read the San Francisco Film Festival’s teaching guide to "Hair Love" here.

Related Content:

Watch 66 Oscar-Nominated-and-Award-Winning Animated Shorts Online, Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada

Watch This Year’s Oscar-Winning Short The Neighbor’s Window, a Surprising Tale of Urban Voyeurism

Watch the Pioneering Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-American Filmmaker

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  Join Ayun’s company Theater of the Apes in New York City this month for her book-based variety series, Necromancers of the Public Domain, and the world premiere of Greg Kotis’ new musical, I AM NOBODY. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

Watch the Oscar-Winning Animated Short “Hair Love” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3aUeGds
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cultivate Our Garden”: An Animated Introduction

“Voltaire’s goal in writing [his 1759 satire Candide ] was to destroy the optimism of his times,” says Alain de Botton in the School of Life video above, “an optimism that centered around science, love, technical progress, and a faith in reason.” These beliefs were folly, Voltaire thought: the transfer of faith from a providential God to a perfect, clockwork universe. Candide satirizes this happy rationalism in Doctor Pangloss, whose belief that ours is the best of possible worlds comes directly from the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Leibniz . The preponderance of the evidence, Voltaire made abundantly clear in the novel’s series of increasingly horrific episodes, points toward a blind, indifferent universe full of needless cruelty and chaos. “Hope was, he felt, a disease,” de Botton says, and “it was Voltaire’s generous goal to try and cure us of it.” But as everyone who has read Candide (or read a summary or brief notes on Candide ) knows, the novel does not end with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Interactive Map of Odysseus’ 10-Year Journey in Homer’s Odyssey

The Odyssey , one of Homer's two great epics, narrates Odysseus' long, strange trip home after the Trojan war . During their ten-year journey, Odysseus and his men had to overcome divine and natural forces, from battering storms and winds to difficult encounters with the Cyclops Polyphemus, the cannibalistic Laestrygones, the witch-goddess Circe and the rest. And they took a most circuitous route, bouncing all over the Mediterranean, moving first down to Crete and Tunisia. Next over to Sicily, then off toward Spain, and back to Greece again. If you're looking for an easy way to visualize all of the twists and turns in  The Odyssey , then we'd recommend spending some time with the  interactive map created by Gisèle Mounzer .  "Odysseus' Journey"  breaks down Odysseus' voyage into 14 key scenes and locates them on a modern map designed by Esri, a company that creates GIS mapping software. Meanwhile, if you're interested in the whole concept of ...
Post a Comment
Read more