Chuck Jones’ The Dot and the Line Celebrates Geometry & Laborious Work: An Oscar-Profitable Animation (1965)

The ani­mat­ed brief above, The Dot and the Line, direct­ed by the nice Chuck Jones and nar­rat­ed by Eng­lish actor Robert Mor­ley, gained an Oscar in 19656 for Finest Ani­mat­ed Quick Movie. Based mostly on a book writ­ten by Nor­ton Juster, “The Dot and the Line” tells the sto­ry of a romance between two geo­met­ric shapes—taking the arche­typ­al nar­ra­tive tra­jec­to­ry of boy meets woman, los­es woman, wins woman ultimately (discover­ing him­self alongside the best way) and inject­ing it with some fas­ci­nat­ing social com­males­tary that also res­onates virtually fifty years lat­er. A technique of watch­ing “The Dot and the Line” is as a “tri­umph of the nerd” sto­ry, the place an anx­ious sq. (as in “uncool”) Line has to com­pete with a hip­ster beat­nik Squig­gle of a rival for the affec­tions of a flighty Dot.

The Line begins the movie “stiff as a stick… uninteresting, con­ven­tion­al and repressed” (as his love inter­est says of him) in con­trast to the groovy Squig­gle and his groovy bebop sound­monitor. With the pos­si­ble sug­ges­tion that this love trans­gress­es mid-cen­tu­ry racial sure­aries, the Line’s mates dis­ap­show and inform him to provide it up, since “all of them look alike any­means.” However the Line per­sists in his fol­ly, indulging in some Wal­ter Mit­ty-like rever­ies of hero­ic endeav­ors that may win over his Dot. Ultimate­ly, utilizing “nice self-con­trol,” he man­ages to bend him­self into an angle, then anoth­er, then a sequence of sim­ple, then very com­plex, shapes, becom­ing, we would assume, some sort of math­e­mat­i­cal wiz. After refin­ing his tal­ents alone, he goes off to point out them to Dot, who’s “over­whelmed” and delight­ed and who “gig­gles like a college­woman.”

Right here the sub­textual content of the nerd-gets-the-girl sto­ry­line man­i­fests a good­ly con­ser­v­a­tive cri­tique of the “anar­chy” of the Squig­gle, whom the Dot involves see as “undis­ci­plined, grace­much less, coarse” and oth­er unflat­ter­ing adjec­tives whereas the road—who professional­claimed to him­self ear­li­er that “free­dom shouldn’t be a license for chaos”—is “daz­zling, intelligent, mys­te­ri­ous, ver­sa­tile, mild, elo­quent, professional­discovered, enig­mat­ic, com­plex, and com­pelling.” I can virtually imag­ine that George Will had a hand within the writ­ing, which is to say that it’s enor­mous­ly intelligent, and enor­mous­ly make investments­ed within the val­ues of self-con­trol, onerous work, and dis­ci­pline, and dis­belief­ful of spon­tane­ity, free play, and gen­er­al groovi­ness. On the finish of the movie, our Dot and Line go off to reside “if not hap­pi­ly ever after, at the least rea­son­ably so” in some cozy sub­urb, little question. The ethical of the sto­ry? “To the vec­tor belong the spoils.”

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