The Dot and the Line

After his tenure with Tom and Jerry, a love-it-or-hate-it period in which Chuck Jones was heavily criticized for trying to transform the cat and mouse into Looney Tunes proxies, Jones directed the only two non-Tom and Jerry shorts for MGM. The first was also his lone competitive Oscar win. Other short films he had directed had seized the grand prize, but since he wasn’t listed as a producer he didn’t get his name on the statuette.

The most immediately evident difference between his beloved Looney Tunes work and this strange little short is the sense of complete abstraction at play here. Lacking any recognizably human characters, Jones uses splashes of bright colors and geometric shapes, backgrounds that swirl and constantly change patterns to tell us the emotional journey of a blue line, a pink circle, and a black squiggle. What’s strange about it though is just how easily he manages to pull it off.

“The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics” does feature a heavy-handed narration by Robert Morley, essentially reading large passages of Norton Juster’s original text. Yet the sheer excellence and exuberance of the animation allows us to skip past that and focus our attention on the beauty and strength of the technical skills on display. There’s also a naughty bit of subtext, as the pink circle rolls around with both the black squiggle and the rigid blue line, coupled with the narration detailing the tortured romance, and it all paints a strange picture of erotic geometric sensuality on display. That’s not even taking into account the color-coding on display here, or the sheer lack of subtlety in making the female figure a warm circular object and the male a hard, rigid one. Very cheeky Mr. Jones, very cheeky.