A father standing in front of his little girl’s hair, comb in hand, not knowing where to start — that seven-minute story just won an Oscar. On February 9, 2020, Matthew A. Cherry’s animated short Hair Love won Best Animated Short Film at the 92nd Academy Awards, and natural hair walked onto the biggest stage in Hollywood holding a trophy.
The film follows Stephen, an African American father learning to style his daughter Zuri’s natural hair for the first time while her mother is in hospital. There is almost no dialogue. There doesn’t need to be. Every parent who has ever wrestled a puff, a part and a crying toddler into something presentable knows exactly what Stephen is feeling in every frame — the panic, the YouTube tutorial, the defeat, and then the quiet determination to get it right for his baby girl.
A Kickstarter record became an Oscar
Cherry wrote and directed Hair Love with a stated intent this page has waited a long time to hear from Hollywood: to “normalize Black hair.” Before it was a film, it was a bet. In 2017 the project launched on Kickstarter and raised $284,058 — a platform record for a short film. Thousands of ordinary people paid in advance for a story the studios had never thought to tell, about hair exactly like the hair in their own houses.
Sony Pictures Animation released the short, and Oscar night finished the argument. Producer Karen Rupert Toliver became the first Black woman to win an Oscar in an animation category. And Cherry used his acceptance speech to advocate for the CROWN Act — the law banning hair discrimination — turning a trophy moment into a policy moment on live television.
The guest who said everything
Cherry’s guest that night was DeAndre Arnold, the Texas teen who had been told to cut his locs or miss his own graduation. Arnold’s story ran on this page earlier in our series — a school, a dress code, and a young man who refused to cut who he was for a ceremony. To see him standing on the Oscar red carpet, locs and all, beside the people who put a little girl’s natural hair on the big screen, was the whole movement in one photograph: the hair is not the problem. It never was.
A Hair Love picture book, illustrated by Vashti Harrison, became a New York Times bestseller in 2019, and a follow-up series, Young Love, carried the family’s story forward. One short film became a shelf, a series and a statute argument. That is what happens when a story everybody recognized finally gets told by somebody who lived it.
Join the conversation
Did Hair Love make you cry the first time you saw it — and be honest, which parent in your house is Stephen in front of the hair, learning as they go? And should every little girl get to see her own hair in a cartoon? Tell us below.
Source note: The Hair Love account — Matthew A. Cherry’s animated short about father Stephen learning to style his daughter Zuri’s natural hair while her mother is in hospital, written and directed by Cherry with the stated intent to “normalize Black hair”; its 2017 Kickstarter raising $284,058, a platform record for a short film; its win for Best Animated Short Film at the 92nd Academy Awards on February 9, 2020; producer Karen Rupert Toliver becoming the first Black woman to win an Oscar in an animation category; Cherry’s acceptance-speech advocacy for the CROWN Act and his guest DeAndre Arnold, the Texas teen told to cut his locs or miss graduation; the 2019 picture book illustrated by Vashti Harrison becoming a New York Times bestseller; the follow-up series Young Love; and Sony Pictures Animation’s release of the short — is from Associated Press coverage of the 92nd Oscars, TheWrap, Stylist and Deseret News (February 2020).
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