Bond Over Beethoven Led to Kobe Bryant’s Oscar for ‘Dear Basketball’ A shared love fo | 2020-01-27 11:18:57 (Visits: 1061 Times) |  | | 1,Kobe Bryant and Glen Keane won the 2018 Academy Award for best animated short film.Credit...Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated Press.
2,Bryant and Keane studied game footage together. “Kobe remembers everything about those plays and talked about what was going through his mind,” Keane said.Credit...Bryan Derballa for The New York Times
By Charles Solomon and Michael Cooper
Jan. 26, 2020
Even before he wrote the poem on which the Oscar-winning short “Dear Basketball” was based, Kobe Bryant was interested in animation.
He approached the former Disney animator Glen Keane after seeing his film “Duet.” Bryant explained in an interview in 2017, “Animation can capture the emotion in the story in a much more compelling, visual way than live action.”
“Dear Basketball” illustrated the poem Bryant wrote in 2015 as a farewell to the sport he loved; it served as his announcement that the 2015-16 season would be his last. In the poem, recognizing that his body can no longer bear the game’s demands, he accepts the inevitably of retirement.
The two men bonded through a shared love of Beethoven. Keane, who had animated Beast in Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, was amazed to learn that in one championship game, “Kobe structured his performance and the strategy of the game to the rhythms of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”
Keane’s rough pencil drawings depict Bryant as both a Los Angeles Lakers superstar and as a small boy, executing the same leaps and dribbling maneuvers. The film, featuring a score by the composer John Williams, won both the Academy Award for best animated short in 2018 and the Annie Award, the animation industry’s most prestigious prize.
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“Glen came to the sport with fresh eyes,” he said. “Someone who’s been watching basketball their whole lives — and playing it — tends to miss the small moves, the details. When you come at with fresh eyes, you look at every single thing because it’s all new.”
Bryant explained in the 2017 interview: “Every game has a structure, just like a piece of music has structure and momentum. You have to be conscious of how that momentum is building to be able to shift or alter it.”
Keane recalled studying game footage with Bryant. “Kobe remembers everything about those plays, and talked about what was going through his mind,” he said. “It was really important to me to animate not just the physical action, but what he was thinking.”
Keane said that in a way, “I believe I know Kobe better than he does, because he hasn’t had to draw himself.
”I’d see the way his knees would angle in as he was shooting the ball, the way he’d kick his feet out to throw his hips around to give himself some lateral movement,” he said.
To score the short film, Bryant asked Williams, the five-time Oscar winning composer for the “Star Wars” series, “Schindler’s List,” “E.T. the Extraterrestrial” and other films.
They had already begun a relationship of sorts. Bryant had previously reached out to Williams, thinking he could learn a thing or two from another master of the score.
“What makes a John Williams piece timeless?” Bryant mused to The Los Angeles Times. “How is he using each instrument? How is he building momentum? As a basketball player, what I found myself doing a lot was essentially conducting a game, right?”
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