My love letter to basketball, Directed & Animated by @GlenKeanePrd, Original Score by John Williams. Watch it here! https://t.co/RTBMuSuHZu #DearBasketball @go90Sports pic.twitter.com/4RaQoQsvDt

— Kobe Bryant (@kobebryant) December 18, 2017

On Monday night at the Staples Center, those 20 exhilarating years were honored with the retirement of not one but two jerseys — No. 8 and No. 24 — which Bryant wore throughout his career.

To mark the occasion, Bryant publicly premiered a five-minute animated movie based on his retirement announcement poem, Dear Basketball, originally was published in 2015.

Bryant (who played more than 48,000 minutes in the NBA) poignantly uses the poem to find closure with walking away from the game that had been the foundation of his life. The film, which debuted exclusively on Verizon Media’s go90 app on the day of Bryant’s jersey retirement, features Academy Award-winning composer John Williams scoring the piece, and legendary Disney animator Glen Keane providing animations to bring the poem to life.

“Animation has always been extraordinarily close to my heart because of its timeless storytelling,” Bryant, 39, tells PEOPLE. “There is something very special about a style of filmmaking which resonates generationally over and over again.”

Dear Basketball previously debuted at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival and took home two awards at the 2017 World Animation Celebration. It is currently shortlisted as an Oscar contender for best animated short and has a shot at making the final five nominees when the Academy announces their picks on January 23.

“He just remembered everything and every moment and every game. He’s an incredibly smart guy that remembers details,” Keane, 63, says. “From there we talked about the craft of basketball, from beginning to end, building layer upon layer, bit by bit.”

Bryant’s ability to recall such information was invaluable to Keane, he says, since he animates his characters not by evaluating their actions, but their thoughts.

“It lets me live inside the characters, so I’m not animating from the outside, I’m animating it from the inside,” he explains. “The desire. The strategy. You draw it differently if you know what’s going on in the character you’re animating in their mind.”

Of course, one of the most charming characteristics of the film is that it is hand-drawn, an increasing rarity in an age dominated by flashy computer animation since the dawn of Toy Story.

“I especially love hand-drawn animation because it brings a rawness that enhances the story,” Bryant says. “The messages, the artistry, the emotions all live on indefinitely in animated films.”

For Keane, it was important that Bryant’s childhood and adulthood not be entirely separated. Instead, he wanted to show that the child who dreamed of reaching NBA stardom had never left Bryant’s side, and had remained there through it all —from the missed shots, the game winners, the championship parades, to the torn achilles — because Bryant never lost his childhood wonderment to the game.

“In the film, you have a little boy who is living and is right there next to Kobe even as he grows up. That little six-year-old is still right there with him,” Keane says. “Kobe wanted any kid in the world to see the film and be able to follow the steps, and see that he was able to do it. It’s about having a dream and filling it.”