During our MCSM 2400 class recently, Professor Chambers showed us an animated short film titled ‘Hair Love’. The film was very well received and received an accolade from the Academy Awards for best animated short film. ‘Hair Love’ is a story that focuses on a young black girl who needs to get her hair done a certain way for her ballet recital. The short film also touches on family (ill family members, familial gender roles, etc.), love, and focuses on black hair.
As the film begins, the main character (a young black girl, approx. between ages 5-9) needs to get her hair done for a ballet recital, so she attempts to do it. However, her hair is very large and ‘unruly’, so she’s unable to do it. When the little girl’s father comes in and sees her dilemma, he attempts to do it for her. After he’s unsuccessful as well, he attempts to put a hat on her hair, causing her to cry and lock herself in the bathroom. Realizing he disappointed his daughter, the father finds an old video of his wife doing his daughter’s hair, and comes back to his daughter to try again. After focusing on the video and putting in a lot of hard work, the father is finally able to get his daughter’s hair into the hairstyle that she wanted.
Once the father and daughter share a sentimental moment, they finally leave the house. Before dropping his daughter off at school though, they go to visit his wife in the hospital, who appears to be a cancer patient considering the fact that she’s bald. The mother looks at her daughter’s head, and the family exchanges a happy moment before the father wheels his wife out of the hospital, giving his daughter a fist pump on the way out. This is how the film ends.
I felt like I was able to relate to the film in some ways coming from a black household, but I was also unable to relate to certain things. Growing up as a black boy, I’ve never had hair that was hard to manage, because my father would take me to get it cut when it got a certain length. However, growing up with a little sister, I remember witnessing my mother doing my sister’s hair often, and I remember my sister often crying throughout the process. I feel as though black hair is very different from hair of other cultures, considering our hair texture(s), therefore making the products we use and hairstyles we adapt very different from those of other races. I believe that the short film does a good job representing black families and the complexities of black hair.
Also, when I was younger, my mother had breast cancer. Although my mother caught the cancer early on and was cancer-free in a short time, her contracting cancer took a toll on my family, which intensified the circumstances in this short film for me because I was able to relate to an extent. At the beginning of the film, I initially thought that her mother had died, because it was clear that she wasn’t around when the little girl needed her hair done. I was happy at the end to see that her mother was still alive, and I think it was a nice way to unite the family for a conclusion. I also believe that making the mother bald shows a good contrast between her and her daughter, and it’s somewhat unexpected because the videos/pictures of her mother beforehand show her with a lot of hair, just like her daughter. However, I think that the father and daughter still showing the mother love with a bald head is a form of hair love as well, tying into the theme that black people are beautiful no matter what their hair looks like.
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