O, love. So mathematical. So precise. So Euclidean in its geometry, so clearly defined in its boundaries. So…wait, what?
That’s exactly what we said when we first watched “The Dot and the Line,” the subtle, humorous short adapted by the god Chuck Jones from the book of the same name by Norton Juster. (Yeah, yo, THAT Norton Juster!) The film, which won the 1965 Academy Award for Animated Short film, details the love affair between—you guessed it—a dot and a line. It is brilliant and beautiful. It is inspired and (for us, quite literally) inspirational. It is also steeped in 1960s gender politics, and as such is thematically—if not mathematically—imperfect.
Watching “The Dot and the Line” in 2017 takes some pretty serious mental adjustments. For one, its exploration of romance through geometry operates squarely within the limits of the male gaze. “I’ve got dignity!” the blue-toned Line cries after the Dot spurns him, only to wax poetic about all the ways she’s perfectly shaped from every angle. Spurred into learning to change his shape in order to impress the Dot, the Line’s route to altering his staid ways makes up the entire arc of the cartoon—but what’s missing is any sense that the change was healthy for him in the first place. It’s not as if the short is completely devoid of self-awareness on this point either, as even the Line’s fellow straitlaced friends console him with expert puns: “She’s got no depth!”
Nonetheless, the Line changes in an attempt to impress the Dot, and once he learns he can twist and turn right alongside party animals like the Dot’s beau, the Squiggle—but in a more exacting, thoughtful, sensitive way that accommodates the Dot, of course—it’s game over. He’s “bursting with old love and new confidence,” just like every fuccboi ex-boyfriend you’ve ever gotten a midnight text from. The Dot, of course, is totally for it. She falls head over circumference for the Line, and they live happily ever after—or, the narrator points out in his playful English accent, “at least reasonably so.” If all of it sounds remarkably like a ‘60s-era children’s fairy tale, that’s because it is.
You should watch it anyway. You should watch it because in spite of its failings, it’s still a visual smorgasbord brimming with color and the joy of relishing in the kind of creative freedom you only get out of limiting yourself to a very simple idea. (Seriously. It’s a dot and a line falling in love.) You should watch it because it’s filled with subtle verbal humor on a level to which gags from its contemporary, Jones’s powerhouse Looney Tunes, rarely rose. You should watch it because in 10 minutes, Jones and Juster manage to capture, albeit imperfectly, some of the most universal aspects of human existence: lust, insecurity, growth, and—yes!—love.
Love drives us all, as it does the Dot and her Line. Love is rife with imperfection. Love makes us do insane things, like bend and expand when we’ve lived our whole lives on the same straight and narrow path. Love inspires us to creative heights and sends us into spirals of self-doubt. It makes you blind, it does you in, it makes you think you’re pretty tough, It makes you prone to crime and sin, it makes you say things off the cuff. “The Dot and the Line” short shows us the contours of all these things, and The Dot and Line site has always taken its cues from that ethos.
If you boil it down, love is the single reason we operate. We launched this site one year ago today because we loved cartoons. Today, we still do—and we love our writers, and we love to nerd out with our writers about those cartoons. While the short cannot be credited entirely for the past year of robust interviews, brave confessionals, super-scientific rankings, breaking news, and comprehensive multi-story packages, it is certainly why we have such a snappy name, and it informs our work every week.
So, seriously, watch it. Because it’s about love. Because we all love animation. And because we love you.
All our love,
Eric, John, and The Dot and Line
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