Hair Love is a Kickstarter-funded (later picked up by Sony Pictures Animation) 2019 short film written by Matthew A. Cherry and directed by Cherry, Bruce W. Smith and Everett Downing Jr.
A young African-American girl named Zuri is wrestling with her hair. She is trying to style it, but her enormous Afro defeats all her attempts. She consults an internet vlog about styling black hair, and carefully follows the instructions filmed by the lady vlogger, but fails. Next, her father also struggles with her hair, and also fails. It's eventually revealed that the woman on the internet who's an expert at styling Afros is Zuri's mother (voiced by Issa Rae) — who is nowhere to be seen.
In December 2019, Sony made the short available to watch
on YouTube.
The film won Best Animated Short at the 2019 Academy Awards.
On July 7, 2020, it was announced that an animated family sitcom starring the family from the short, entitled Young Love, was being developed for HBO Max.
Tropes:
- Bait-and-Switch: Zuri's dad learns from a black hair blog how to do Zuri's hair. The woman running the blog is Zuri's mother. The film at first seems to imply that she has died, and Zuri wants to do her hair up in memory of her. The end of the film actually reveals that Zuri just wanted to look nice because today is the day they pick her mom up at the hospital after her final chemotherapy treatment. The end credits show the mother's hair growing back, and dad has joined her hair blog.
- Baldness Angst: As a hair vlogger with hundreds of thousands of views on her site, Zuri's mother is obviously self-conscious about her chemotherapy-induced baldness. When she sees a picture Zuri drew of her, bald head and all, she takes off her scarf and displays her scalp openly.
- Chekhov's Gun: Zuri has a drawn picture of a bald woman with a crown topping her head taped to her wall. She gives it to her mother when she and her father go see her at the hospital.
- Compressed Hair: Played for laughs in the beginning. Zuri has a nightcap on when she wakes up. A few seconds after she takes it off, her hair decompresses into a massive Afro that's almost as wide as she is tall.
- Curly Hair Is Ugly: The short (and the story behind it) is an attempt to show black girls that they don't need to change their natural hair in order to be beautiful.
- Dramatic Drop: Zuri's father drops the hamper of laundry upon seeing his daughter's hair.
- Flashback: One of the Hair Love videos reveals that the woman on the internet who made the videos is Zuri's mom.
- Foreshadowing:
- Although it's implied that Zuri's mom is dead, it's also implied that Zuri and her dad have somewhere to be: Zuri has a specific date marked off with a heart, and her father checks his watch as she's messing with her hair. Turns out they were actually getting ready to pick up Zuri's mom from a hospital's cancer ward.
- Zuri also refuses twice to wear a knitted cap to cover her hair. It's because Zuri's mom is wearing a cap to hide her chemo-induced baldness, and Zuri would rather show off a hairstyle from her mother's hair care blog.
- Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: The woman who runs the Hair Love vlog used herself as an example for all her styling videos, and had roughly shoulder blade-length hair in them. In the film's "present", all her hair has fallen out from chemotherapy.
- Imagine Spot: Zuri's father imagines himself in a boxing ring, literally ''fighting her hair'' when he first attempts to style it.
- Intellectual Animal: The pet cat is capable of silently giving his opinions on the hairstyles Zuri considers with a wave of the paw or a shake of the head.
- Intimate Hair Brushing: Zuri's father when he succeeds in styling her hair (for what's implied to be the first time he's done it).
- Missing Mom: Downplayed. Zuri's mother is revealed to be alive but had to stay in a hospital for an undisclosed amount of time to receive chemotherapy treatment.
- Pink Girl, Blue Boy: Zuri's outfit and hair decorations is pink, while her father wears a blue buttoned blouse.
- Prehensile Hair: Zuri's father attempts to brush her hair, only for Zuri's hair to actually grab the comb and brandish it at him. This is followed by an Imagine Spot in which her father finds himself in a boxing ring fighting her hair.
- Rule of Symbolism: The drawing of Zuri's mom with her hair bald but topped with a crown. To Zuri, her mom is still a queen whether or not she has hair.
- Stubborn Hair: Zuri and her father have to deal with hers. It's not really any more stubborn than any other black woman's hair, it's just that neither of them have ever had to deal with it, since her mother always styled it before this day.
- Unnamed Parent: Zuri's father and mother are never given names.
- Visual Title Drop: "Hair Love" is the name of the video blog which Zuri's mother runs.
