Disney legend teams with basketball superstar Kobe Bryant and celebrated composer John Williams to deliver Oscar hopeful.
Glen Keane and Kobe Bryant formed an unlikely team in order to produce Dear Basketball, one of the films in a list of 10 that may be nominated for the Academy Award for best animated short, and now available to watch online via Verizon.
Veritable animation legend Glen Keane is not a big basketball fan -- but he is a fan of veritable basketball legend Kobe Bryant. “There was something in the energy and the passion, there was electricity on the court when Kobe was playing,” says Keane with a great deal of admiration in his voice.
Lucky, then, that Bryant chose to approach Keane to develop an animated short based on his love letter “Dear Basketball,” first published in 2015, when Bryant announced his retirement from the game. The two greats clicked straightaway, and worked closely together throughout the process. “[Kobe] is such an easygoing person, that you immediately feel at home and comfortable with him, and we started to connect on creative ideas. It was a conversation that just ran on constantly,” Keane says of their first meeting.
Keane, who designed some of Disney’s most beloved characters during his near four-decade stint at the animation powerhouse, struggled to create an animated version of the larger-than-life Bryant (“He’s real, and everybody knows what he looks like,” Keane grumbles), but had no trouble tapping into his character’s drive. In fact, Keane sees Bryant as being very similar to one of his most iconic creations. It’s probably not often that Bryant finds himself being compared to a young mermaid with hopes of living on land, but Keane does it eloquently.
“For me, in animating, I really relate to characters that believe the impossible is possible, like Ariel,” he explains. “She’s a mermaid, she’s fallen in love with a guy with legs -- this is an impossible relationship, but she goes for it anyway. I connect to characters that have got that burning desire in their hearts. I immediately connected to this drive that Kobe has.”
The short’s style deviates from the clean lines of Keane’s previous work with Disney, however. Like Keane’s previous shorts Duet and Nephtali, Dear Basketball has a rough, sketchy feel that celebrates the origins of animation. “I describe rough animation as a seismograph of your soul. When someone does a cleaned up line, the original energy of those lines is gone,” Keane laments. His son, Max, who also served as production designer on Dear Basketball, encouraged him to go in an impressionistic direction. “Kobe was also texting me, and it was all about, ‘Let’s make this film, it’s got to be hand-drawn, it’s got to be personal, it’s got to be expressive.’”
Music was perhaps just as crucial to the realization of Keane and Bryant’s vision. They managed to get John Williams, composer of little known series such as Harry Potter and Star Wars, attached early on in the project, because “if you’re Kobe Bryant you can call anybody on the planet.”
“[Our love of] Beethoven became one of the big things that [Kobe and I] connected on, actually. At one point, I guess Kobe played a championship game to Beethoven’s fifth in his mind, and to me, I was always animating to Beethoven’s ninth. That became a touch point,” says Keane, though he also notes that Williams pulled back from doing a big, cinematic score in order to compose something more understated and intimate.
Keane warned Bryant early on that he didn’t have the strongest background in basketball. “As I told him, ‘You’ve got the worst basketball player on Earth to animate you,’” Keane laughs. But in the end, the film was never just about the sport.
“I realized at the end of this film that little Kobe is still there with big Kobe, that this transcended basketball. It’s talking to any human being who’s grown up and has had a dream from when they were a kid,” says Keane. “So many people who do not have any interest in basketball are in tears [after watching Dear Basketball]. I think it’s because they’re surprised. It comes in the back door, and suddenly they’re touched.”
At the Los Angeles Staples Center on December 18, 2017, the Lakers retired both of Kobe Bryant’s jerseys in a moving ceremony that paid tribute to a 20-year career. Dear Basketball was then officially premiered to the tune of 21,000 live onlookers and over 460,000 remote viewers.
“It was absolutely wonderful, hearing people crying around you. At the end of the short, when little Kobe and big Kobe are on the court, they both shoot, and the ball goes through the hoop, and little Kobe lifts his arms in triumph, and you hear for the first time this huge crowd cheering in the film,” describes Keane. “The crowd at the Staples Center started cheering at the same time, and I couldn’t tell what was the film and what was reality. It was just one large roar that was filling the stadium. I’ll never forget that.”
Ko Ricker is an LA-based writer obsessed with animation and its limitless narrative potential.
