“The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics" was awarded the Academy Award for Animated Short Film in 1965. It is based on the book by Norton Juster published two years earlier, a budding romance between a dot and an initially unyieldingly straight line.
The trigonometric love story has a third person (love triangle) involved - a rather unruly squiggle - with the dot attracted by the sheer unpredictability of the squiggle provoking much soul searching from the line.
He has to change, discovers angles, whereupon she comes to realise the problems with anarchy and turns to the soaring line in his new role of parallelogram, polygon, quadrilateral: a case of Elizabeth Bennet casting out Wickham and turning at last to Darcy who she had first thought to be a square!
Normally when I commend animations I do so due to the power of the art. One might believe there is only so much even a genius like Chuck Jones (pictured)(and co-director Maurice Noble) can do with dot, line and squiggle, more geometric than artistic, though abstract artists would I am sure disagree! This makes the visual inventiveness of the piece that more impressive.
There is a narrative spell too via the voice of the great English character actor (in overly pompous mode here I feel), Robert Adolph Wilton Morley. The script is memorable for its deft use of pun and wordplay: she is the perfectly curved dot, though her first assessment of him: “you are as stiff as a stick". The final pun is worthy of a screenprint.
To view the Oscar winning short use the video below:
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