Review of Hair Love

Sony Pictures' "Hair Love" is an animated short film from 2019 that runs for 7 minutes and was written by Matthew A. Cherry, who is also one of (surprisingly) three directors working on this one we have here. (Talk about too many cooks spoiling the broth.) He has been part of the industry for about a decade now, so this film's success is really a bit of an anniversary for him you could say and with "success" I mean the fact that this is nominated for an Academy Award and I have seen some people say it is not entirely unlikely to take home the trophy. We will see about that come Oscar night. My opinion is that it would be very undeserving and that the nomination is already too much. The animation is okay overall, but nothing stands out too much about it and of course this is always a subjective take, but I feel as if the film could have needed slightly better attention to detail. There are 3 or 4 fun moments like the father's face expression when he sees early on what the girl did to her hair and also in the second half there is more. It will depend on your humor how much you like it. I personally did not think it was as funny as I wanted it to be. For example, the cat scenes like when it gives daddy the eye for what he did or also the way too long boxing segment did not impress me particularly. The ending then is also not good. It feels really emotional for the sake of it and not in a way where it is really as touching as it aspires to be. The sunlight pouring in at them is just one inclusion that made me chuckle in a rather bad way because that (also the way it looked in terms of animation) was something that could have been done by a film scholar at the start of his studies. The painting did not work too well either and felt really random and when we are supposed to think it is a big moment when she shows us her bald head, it was nothing like that because it was obvious anyway she was suffering from cancer and had no hair. Or was it meant that she was not ashamed to show herself like that? I don't know. But it was not working particularly well. A bit of a pity here and also a missed opportunity. By the way, the only voice you hear in this film is the one by Golden Globe nominee Issa Rae. So if you are a big fan of her and don't mind animation, you can give it a go, but overall I give this film a thumbs-down and really hope it's not gonna triumph at the Oscars. I mean they cannot go for this pretty simple take only because the liberals among them are probably fond of the characters' ethnicities, can they? There are more deserving nominees to choose from. Other awards bodies got it right by completely ignoring this one. Due to the (lack of real) quality I am glad this was a relatively short film. Watch something else instead.