Following yesterday’s helicopter crash near Calabasas, California that killed nine people, including basketball player Kobe Bryant, Charles Solomon and Michael Cooper write in Sunday’s (1/26) New York Times about Bryant and Glen Keane’s 2018 animated short film Dear Basketball, which “illustrated the poem Bryant wrote in 2015 as a farewell to the sport he loved…. In the poem, recognizing that his body can no longer bear the game’s demands, he accepts the inevitably of retirement…. 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. [Keane and Bryant] bonded through a shared love of Beethoven. Keane … 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.’ … Bryant had previously reached out to Williams, thinking he could learn a thing or two from another master of the score…. Bryant confessed to an ulterior motive: each night he would lull his daughters to sleep with Williams’s melodies—especially ‘Hedwig’s Theme’ from the ‘Harry Potter’ films—and he wanted to take a picture with the composer to show them.”
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