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

The animated short above, The Dot and the Line, directed by the great Chuck Jones and narrated by English actor Robert Morley, won an Oscar in 1965 for Best Animated Short Film. Based 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 girl, loses girl, wins girl in the end (finding himself along the way) and injecting it with some fascinating social commentary that still resonates almost fifty years later. One way of watching “The Dot and the Line” is as a “triumph of the nerd” story, where an anxious square (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 film “stiff as a stick… dull, conventional and repressed” (as his love interest says of him) in contrast to the groovy Squiggle and his groovy bebop soundtrack. With the possible suggestion that this love transgresses mid-century racial boundaries, the Line’s friends disapprove and tell him to give it up, since “they all look alike anyway.” But the Line persists in his folly, indulging in some Walter Mitty-like reveries of heroic endeavors that might win over his Dot. Finally, using “great self-control,” he manages to bend himself into an angle, then another, then a series of simple, then very complex, shapes, becoming, we might assume, some kind of mathematical wiz. After refining his talents alone, he goes off to show them to Dot, who is “overwhelmed” and delighted and who “giggles like a schoolgirl.”

Here the subtext of the nerd-gets-the-girl storyline manifests a fairly conservative critique of the “anarchy” of the Squiggle, whom the Dot comes to see as “undisciplined, graceless, coarse” and other unflattering adjectives while the line—who proclaimed to himself earlier that “freedom is not a license for chaos”—is “dazzling, clever, mysterious, versatile, light, eloquent, profound, enigmatic, complex, and compelling.” I can almost imagine that George Will had a hand in the writing, which is to say that it’s enormously clever, and enormously invested in the values of self-control, hard work, and discipline, and distrustful of spontaneity, free play, and general grooviness. At the end of the film, our Dot and Line go off to live “if not happily ever after, at least reasonably so” in some cozy suburb, no doubt. The moral of the story? “To the vector belong the spoils.”

via Boing Boing

Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.


by | Permalink | Comments (11) |

Support Open Culture

We’re hoping to rely on our loyal readers rather than erratic ads. To support Open Culture’s educational mission, please consider making a donation. We accept PayPal, Venmo (@openculture), Patreon and Crypto! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Comments (11)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
  • Jeremy says:

    “The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics,” was a book written by Norton Juster, published by Random House in 1963. The story was definitely inspired by Flatland, but you’ve left out an important fact by not noting that the film was directly based on Juster’s book. Juster, as many realize, was also the author of The Phantom Tollbooth.

  • ron king says:

    i was looking for info on Les Goldman, the producer

  • Joan Ahearn says:

    I own a an original copy of The Dot and The Line by Norton Juster, Published in 1963 was trying to find out what it is worth. Joan

  • Jessicka Chamberlin says:

    Loved this! Thank your for posting. Quick correction:

    In this context it’s ‘coarse’, not ‘course’.

    Since you are sharing you were pppa piece about the triumph of the nerd, your could stand a little nerdy nitpicking.

  • Kirra says:

    The Dot and The Line is one of the few books I carry with me in the RV while camping!

  • Toni says:

    Wonderful film but please lose the horrid, inaccurate subtitles, splayed across my screen!

  • Richard Pardoe says:

    Thanks for posting but why say ‘directed by the great Chuck Jones and narrated by English actor Robert Morley’? It’s as if everything American is ‘home’ and that you have to explain everything else as ‘foreign’. I should have thought that the very notion of Open Culture as an ideal is internationalist.

  • M.Nicole says:

    can u please help me where is the place published and the locale of this book….

  • Monty says:

    The credit here should really be going to Maurice Noble not Chuck Jones.

  • karen marie says:

    “undisciplined, graceless, course”

    A doctoral candidate in English? I certainly hope your doctoral work was better than this. The intended word, of course, is “coarse.”

  • Josh Jones says:

    It’s only a typo, friend, but thanks for spotting it.

Leave a Reply

Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.