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Shout Out to Award-Winning Black Hair in ‘Hair Love’

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It’s been a few days since the most recent Academy Awards and not only do we still remember them, we remember them for being good! The best movie of the year, Bong Joon-ho’s unparalleled South Korean social satire Parasite, actually took home the top prize for Best Picture! How wild is that!

But since it’s also Black History Month, for us the other big winner was the animated short Hair Love and its confirmed Academy Award-worthy take on Black families and Black hair.

Fans of animation and representation may have first heard of Hair Love a few years ago when it first launched on Kickstarter. Writer/director Matthew A. Cherry had a vision for a cartoon about a father helping his daughter style her afro-textured hair. It’s something so simple and an everyday part of Black life, but Hollywood being what it is this was also something we hadn’t really much of seen in animation before. And enough Kickstarter backers proved this was something they wanted to support. Heck, Cherry was already (accurately) predicting his own Oscar win years in advance.

Flash forward to 2019 when Hair Love finally debuted as a short in front of The Angry Birds Movie 2. Cherry’s partners on the project include Bruce W. Smith (a lowkey legend of Black animation thanks to his work on Bebe’s Kids, The Proud Family, The Princess and the Frog, and more) as well as Insecure’s Issa Rae voicing the mother whose presence gives the simple hair care story added emotional resonance. The result is a short that touched audiences, whether in theaters or in the picture book adaptation for schools.

And that’s great because if you’re looking for examples of how just the basic fact of having a Black body is political, Black hair is a great place to start. Hair Love celebrates kinky locs in a climate where Black students are getting forcibly shaved by schools and getting punished for flaunting their natural texture.

Representing Black hair properly in an animated medium is also a good microcosm for how much you care about proper Black representation at large as a creator. Evan Narcisse at Kotaku has written what is still the definitive take on this topic. I think my own struggles with Black hair and virtual reality headsets touch on this as well. For more you can also play Hair Nah, the indie game about not touching Black hair no matter how cool you think it’ll feel.

We’re sad for a variety of reasons that the Firewatch developers abandoned their narrative adventure game follow-up In the Valley of the Gods to work on Half-Life: Alyx instead. But a big one is now we’ll never see how that game’s commitment to proper 3D rendering of complex coiled hair will turn out. We can do more than shaved heads or big smooth afros.

But at least we have Hair Love, at least the Oscars recognized the humble greatness of Hair Love. Let’s hold onto the victory tight, like a Black father hugging his stylish daughter, because who knows when the Oscars will get it this right again.


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