Blue Ivy Carter, the daughter of Beyonce and Jay-Z, will narrate the audiobook for “Hair Love,” based on Matthew A. Cherry’s Oscar-winning short film.
Cherry won the Oscar for best animated short earlier this year. The short flick centers on a Black father learning to do his daughter’s hair.
Cherry announced the news via his Twitter account.
“Zuri’s hair has a mind of its own. It kinks, coils, and curls every which way. Zuri knows it’s beautiful. When Daddy steps in to style it for an extra special occasion, he has a lot to learn. But he LOVES his Zuri, and he’ll do anything to make her – and her hair – happy. Tender and empowering, Hair Love is an ode to loving your natural hair – and a celebration of daddies and daughters everywhere,” the audiobook summary reads.
Cherry says the idea for the short was inspired by a video posted by Darrell L Hines II.
“I think that video was the best example, because in our short film the hair is active and is a character itself. But it wasn’t just that video, it was the whole movement of videos with dads—Black fathers in particular—going viral,” he told Black Girl Nerds back in 2017.
“Showing dads playing with their kids, showing them how to put on lotion or playing games. These are things all fathers do, but I think because they were Black fathers featured in these videos, people were looking at them almost as though they were outliers or anomalies, thinking, “I’m not used to seeing this, so I’m going to share it, it’s different.”
“My biggest thing is that I want to normalize how fathers, Black fathers, Black men, they tend to be present, even if they aren’t married to the mother, a lot of them are present in their kid’s lives. There was even a study done recently that showed that out of all the racial groups, it is Black men that are the most involved in their kid’s lives.”
