Matthew A. Cherry – Hair Love
2019 · Directed by Matthew A. Cherry, Everett Downing Jr. & Bruce W. Smith
2.3M Likes
Best comments
1.“You can tell he's a dad, 'cause he's got the socks with sandals.”
More comments
- 2.“Me: *shows my dad this video*. My dad: 'That's sick – could I try doing your hair?' Me: Wow, 18 years and all it took was a short film?”
- 3.“Crying quietly at my desk at school. The really awkward part is I'm the teacher.”
The story
No song here. It's a seven-minute cartoon, and it'll wreck you anyway.
Zuri is a little girl with a big head of curls. She tries to copy her mom's hair tutorial video and loses. Her dad, Stephen, steps in and loses worse. So they sit down and watch Mom's video together, and they figure it out. Then they head to the hospital, and the reveal lands: Mom is there, bald from chemo. The credits show her hair growing back. Every dad who has ever been handed a hairbrush and a deadline just felt that in his chest.
Matthew A. Cherry was an NFL wide receiver before he was a filmmaker – Jaguars practice squad, then the Bengals, Panthers and Ravens. In 2017 he put Hair Love on Kickstarter with a $75,000 goal and pulled in around $300,000, more than any short film in the site's history. He directed it with Everett Downing Jr. and Bruce W. Smith, the Proud Family creator, and Issa Rae voiced the mom.
It played in theaters ahead of The Angry Birds Movie 2 in 2019 and won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 2020. Cherry used the speech to back California's CROWN Act against hair discrimination and brought DeAndre Arnold as his guest, a Texas teen told to cut his dreadlocks or skip graduation. Then came a bestselling picture book and the Young Love series on Max. Not bad for a crowdfunded cartoon about a ponytail.
