Hair Love was such a gorgeously animated and heartwarming short that more than earned it's Oscar win at the 2019 Academy Awards. With the animated series, Young Love, acting as the successor, I naturally assumed the momentum of the story would be carried over. Boy howdy and a fair how do you do, was I WRONG! What we have instead is another awful animated sitcom that's prioritizes cringy humor over basic story telling. From the terrible writing to the hatable characters, this show is the equivalent to watching someone try to get gum out of their hair with a chainsaw.
Created by Hair Love co-director Matthew A. Cherry with Carl Jones as his showrunning co-pilot, the show follows the lives of Stephen Love and his family in the suburbs in Chicago. Based on how well executed the Oscar winning short was, you'd think the creators would learn the right lessons and have each episode be a heartwarming tale of sacrifice, responsibility, kindness, and perseverance in the face of uncertainty. If you had those hopes like yours truly, they will be utterly decimated within the first few minutes! The show completely drops the ball from the word go by having some abysmal writing! Conflicts are forced upon the characters at every turn, they mostly stationary in one location at a time, and the resolutions feel unearned and rushed. This show has some awful pacing as every single conflict could be resolved if the child sat down and had honest conversations with one another. It shouldn't take 22 minutes for Stephen to learn how to value himself. Nor should it take that long for Angela to not take advantage of a homeless family for views. The show also has daydream squences that drag the episodes to a crawl. Not helping is the show has very bad humor, ranging from forced pop culture references, cringy slang, and eye roll worthy puns. Whatever remnants of the short's clever writing and inspiring dialogue is barely, if at all, present in this show.
The characters are varying degrees of hatable with the old ones being shells of their former selves at best and the new ones being unbearable. Starting with the lovable child from the short, Zuri is no longer the sweet, innocent, and determined young girl from when we were first introduced to her. Now she's a selfish, irresponsible, annoying, and stupid kid that learns all the wrong lessons from her parents. Her Mom, Angela, went from being this loving, kind, smart, and helpful fashion blogger from the short to this selfish, greedy, arrogant tramp who's too focused on the future to be in the present. Yeah, I know she survived cancer; but anxiety and PTSD is not an excuse for not being in the here and now. Her parents, Russell and Gigi, are some of the most obnoxious animated grandparents with Russell being a greedy cheapskate and Gigi being an overbearing nag. Zuri's friends just take up space, her cousin, Amir, has next-to-no personality, and Lil Ankh is a pampered, spoiled rapper that gives actual rappers a bad look with his selfishness and lack of empathy. Star is also there to just be another annoying nag and could've easily been written out and nothing would change.
Then there's Stephen Love, the protagonist of the short and show. Before I state what's wrong with him, I'd like to share a quote from Matthew A. Cherry about Stephan. "Black fathers have one of the worst raps in mainstream media as being portrayed as being deadbeats and not being involved. It was important to us to showcase a black father that was young, that had tattoos. I think if you saw someone like him on the street, you would assume that wasn't a loving father that does his daughter's hair. We're just trying to change the conversation, one project at a time." That was the goal with Hair Love. That was the intention with Stephen's characters in the short. With the show, they shot themselves in the foot with a FREAKING RPG! Stephen went from being a good father to just another incompetent, deadbeat loser the creators wanted to avoid! He spends more time trying to impress that pampered brat, Lil Ankh, making music at his desk, and taking his personality deprived nephew to a museum than he does with his only daughter! And when he doesn't interact with her directly, the interaction is over before it even begins! His characterization in the short was a breath of fresh air with all the constant terrible depictions of fathers in animation. His character here makes him no different than Peter Griffin, Mr. Turner, and Homer Simpson!
The voice acting is honestly pretty mediocre. I get the actors are trying, but not even the most seasoned of them can make the cringy dialogue work. Kid Cudi (credited by his real name, Scott Mescudi) sounded fine as Stephen, but I feel he could've been more enthusiastic about his relationship with his daughter and music. Issa Rae does pretty well as Angela, but I feel her performance was better in the short because in the show she has to read lines like "You know what, I can do more damage on line! Hand me my phone!" and put on a French accent when she pretends she's in Paris in her apartment and it just doesn't work. Loretta Devine didn't really sound as sassy or as lively as Gigi and it felt more like she was putting on an impression of a Grandma than an actual Grandma. Harry Lennix was alright as Russell, but I felt like the material he was given to work with didn't do his talents justice. Idriys Jones gave Lil Ankh a very irritating and squeaky voice and it just got on my nerves. Tamar Braxton was really just using her normal voice to play Star, which isn't very impressive. The best actor by default is Brooke Monroe Conaway as Zuri, making her sound spunky, energetic and clever. If she had a better script, I'd bump the rating of this review just for her performance. As is, though, she and the rest of the cast just can't salvage the hopeless writing.
Visually, the show looks like a pale imitation of the Oscar winning short. I recognize the show was made with a different animation studio as the animation here was provided by Atomic Cartoons whereas the short was animated by 6 Point Harness, a subsidiary of Mondo Media. Both, however are a joint collaboration with Sony, Lion Forge Animation, and Matthew A. Cherry Entertainment, with the show also being financed by Carl Jones Studios. The end result is a show that looks like the short in stills, but not in motion. The characters have the same appealing, African American abstract art style look with the characters having rounded heads, unique hair styles, and colorful attire. The backgrounds also have look like they were painted with watercolors and gives Chicago a really illustrated look. The problem arises in the actual animation and oh brother from another mother is it BAD! The actual movements of the characters are so stiff, the facial expressions are restricted to their character models, and when they walk it's like they're floating on the bottom of the screen. There's also don't do the daydream sequences any favors as they're visually unimpressive and superfluous. The creative body language, great cinematography, and expressive faces from the short are long gone and in their place is just flat, unimpressive, and stilted animation.
This show is the disaster hair day of animation! Young Love is everything the Oscar winning short is most certainly NOT! It's not well written, it's not funny, it's not well characterized, it's not well acted, it's not even well animated! All this show accomplishes is be a prime example I how NOT to make a cartoon! It more than deserves the worst fate to bestow on a piece of entertainment this bad: to be ignored and forgotten! Do NOT watch Young Love! Spare yourself the crushing disappointment and just watch Hair Love. It's on YouTube and it's only under 7 minutes. You'll be much better off watching the short than this atrocious animated series -.-
