Hair Piece (aka Hair Piece: A Film for Nappy-Headed People) is a 1984 animated short film (ten minutes) directed by Ayoka Chenzira.
It is a wryly humorous take on the complicated relationship between black women and their hair. The film notes Eurocentric standards of beauty and the desire of young black women to look like the white women they saw on movies and TV, with hair that would "blow in the wind". The narrator then talks about the whole history of hair care products meant to straighten out black women's hair, and their downsides: the hot comb (burns your scalp), hair products like Vaseline (hair loses its straightness in the rain), wigs (they make your scalp itchy) and others. Finally the narrator urges black women to wear their hair naturally.
Tropes:
- Clip-Art Animation: Some of the animation consists of clip-art animation of pictures moving around. There's a motif of cut-outs of black women's faces with the hair removed, as well as cut-outs of white women with the cascading hair that black women are encouraged to want.
- The Ken Burns Effect: Part of the Limited Animation of the short is made more lively by the camera panning across or zooming in on the cut-outs and drawings.
- Limited Animation: Mixes clip art, The Ken Burns Effect, and simply drawn figures against plain backgrounds, the latter being used for scenes where the narrator is doing various things to her hair.
- Narrator: A narrator who speaks as the voice of a black woman who knows too well the lengths that young black women will go to in order to straighten their hair.
- Punny Name: Hair Piece. The phrase is synonymous with toupee, but it's also describing the subject of the short, a piece about hair.
- Shout-Out:
- The film opens with a woman singing a sarcastic lyric to the tune of "Ain't Too Proud to Beg." ("I know your head is nappy but I refuse to lend you my comb.")
- The narrator says that when she got her perm, her and the wind blew threw her hair, it made a sound like the man in The Fly. ("Help me, help me.")
- Staggered Zoom: As James Brown sings "please, please, please" on the soundtrack, there's a staggered zoom into a picture of him.
