The animated quick above, The Dot and the Line, directed by the good Chuck Jones and narrated by English actor Robert Morley, received an Oscar in 19656 for Greatest Animated Brief Movie. Primarily based on a guide 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 way in which) and injecting it with some fascinating social commalestary that also resonates virtually fifty years later. A method 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 soundobserve. With the possible suggestion that this love transgresses mid-century racial surearies, the Line’s pals disapshow and inform him to provide it up, since “all of them look alike anymanner.” However the Line persists in his folly, indulging in some Walter Mitty-like reveries of heroic endeavors which may win over his Dot. Lastly, 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 just isn’t 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, arduous 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 dwell “if not happily ever after, not less than reasonably so” in some cozy suburb, little doubt. The ethical of the story? “To the vector belong the spoils.”
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Josh Jones is a author and musician primarily based in Durham, NC.
