Dad and daughter need a little help in this super relatable clip from Matthew Cherry's animated short "Hair Love"
Audiences who plan on checking out The Angry Birds Movie 2 in theaters this weekend will also get to watch “Hair Love,” the animated short film by filmmaker Matthew Cherry and executive-produced by Peter Ramsey (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) and Frank Abney (Toy Story 4). Born of the famously successful 2017 Kickstarter, “Hair Love” is a 5-minute short about a Black father and daughter—Stephen and Zuri—who endure a bit of a journey to get Zuri’s hair styled for a big event. Cherry released a clip via his Twitter account on Wednesday and we think it’s fair to warn you: It’s pretty dang precious.
Between “quick & easy” YouTube hair tutorials that are neither quick nor easy, the growing pile of very necessary hair products, and the allure of just defaulting to a trusty hat, there are actually fewer things more real than this snippet right now. More importantly, “Hair Love” promotes healthy attitudes toward both Black hair and, per Cherry in a 2017 interview, “Black fathers doing domestic things with their kids.” Cherry also recently spoke to HelloBeautiful about the inspiration behind the adorable story:
“I was seeing a lot of viral videos of African-American dads doing their daughter’s hair hitting the timeline and I always like to share family friendly stuff like that. They were going extra viral, 100K retweets, and I would always share videos of moms interacting with their kids too and it would do OK but never as big as that. Obviously they were cute videos but I would come to learn later that part of it was that people weren’t used to seeing these images of African-American fathers doing these type of interactions with their kids (especially when the hair would be moving and breaking rubber bands and hitting dad in the eye). The idea of hair having a mind of its own was the linchpin that created this idea.”
Both The Angry Birds Movie 2 and “Hair Love” are in theaters now.
[Via Collider]