Dear Basketball (2017) on Netflix
NR20176mAnimationBiographySport
As his playing days near their close, Kobe Bryant writes a letter to basketball. He remembers a childhood of rolled-up socks and practiced game-winning shots.
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- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.4/106,454 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes69%
Trailer
Plot summary
On November 29, 2015, Kobe Bryant published a letter announcing that he would leave the NBA at the end of the season. That letter becomes an animated short, opening with a dunk that wins a game for the Los Angeles Lakers as the clock runs out. Bryant speaks to basketball and looks back to childhood, when he rolled his father's tube socks into a ball and shot at the Great Western Forum. The game, he says, called for his hustle, the sweat and the hurt, and he answered with his mind, body, spirit and soul, which carried him to his Laker dream.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dear Basketball (2017)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Dear Basketball won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 90th Academy Awards, the first Oscar win for any professional athlete, and the first for director Glen Keane, a veteran Disney animator.
- To animate sweat, Glen Keane laid a graphite-covered sheet over his drawing, photographed it with his iPhone and turned the picture into a negative, so white became black; an eraser then created highlights and revealed the skin underneath.
- The film adapts a letter Kobe Bryant wrote for The Players' Tribune on November 29, 2015, in which he announced his retirement from basketball.
