A passion project
From Kickstarter to the Oscars, animated short tells touching story
In 2017, Matthew A. Cherry created a Kickstarter campaign in hopes of funding an animated short film about a young black father who learns how to do his daughter’s hair.
Cherry had been thinking about the project, dubbed Hair Love, for several years but was inspired to make it happen after seeing a flood of internet videos featuring black fathers tackling the unruly tresses of their daughters.
Three years later, Cherry has an Oscar nomination for his vision. In just under seven minutes, Hair Love follows Zuri, a seven-year-old with a lively mop of kinky curls, who wakes upon a special day and tries to do her hair with the help of a video made by her mother, a natural-hair vlogger (voiced by Issa Rae, the creator and star of HBO’S Insecure). It does not go well.
Enter Zuri’s father, Stephen, a young man with dreadlocks and the same caramel complexion as his daughter. He also tries (and fails) to do Zuri’s hair, a dramatic bass line underscoring the tension as he nervously attempts to part her thick curls. But after his daughter breaks into tears, he tries again — moisturizing and detangling Zuri’s curls section by section — before twisting them into a stylish row of puff buns.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Cherry said his goal with Hair Love was twofold: He wanted the film to encourage kids to embrace their natural hair. He also wanted the film to portray the powerful images he had seen in those internet videos but typically had not seen on screen, particularly when it came to animated films: black fathers who were deeply present in their children’s lives.
As Hair Love got underway, Cherry sought advice from Karen Rupert Toliver, a longtime animation studio executive who had shepherded the Rio and Ice Age series for Fox Animation. In late 2017, Toliver moved to Sony Animation, where she currently oversees the studio’s creative department. She decided to work on Hair Love as a side project.
“There’s never been a project that hit me so personally as Hair Love. Living with black hair my whole life, growing up in Texas,” said Toliver, whose company picked up the short last March. “There were so many layers to the project that really just spoke to me personally. And I was like, ‘It has to get done.’”
Hair Love was also a side project for Cherry, a former NFL player, who was then working as an exec at Jordan Peele’s production company Monkeypaw. The story features echoes of his early days in filmmaking: The short’s emotional ending reveals why Zuri’s mother was unavailable to do her hair, a tear-jerker plot twist that was inspired by Cherry’s days as a music video director.
“I always try to think of twist endings. You want to try to keep people entertained and kind of take them on a roller-coaster of emotion,” he said. “I just always had the ending in mind.”
The Washington Post