Characters who don’t have the benefit of the spoken word must be anthropomorphized visually, but how was Chuck Jones capable of anthropomorphizing a straight line. It has no eyes. No body to contort, gesture with or express posture. A line has no expression to speak of.
Well, always the creative, cheekily subversive whenever possible, and a titan of animation, Chuck Jones would imbue most of his cartoons with wit and metatextuality, an abrasiveness in competition with the squeaky-clean Disney shorts. Think of the frame-expanding, logic-defying Duck Amuck, putting Daffy Duck through the ringer, at the behest of an uncaring animator liberated from plot and a seeming disdain for his character. In the case of The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics, the title betrays the presumably tongue-in-cheek premise: a love story in lower mathematics would be impossible, let alone compelling. Yet all the time, aside from the animated antics that suggest the shapes’ inner lives, their characters are grounded by, for instance, the titular line’s simple wants.
A Narrator orates his feelings, incorporating a few cutesy and clever jokes mingling society and geometry, all the while building the sort of personality we might presume a line to be in possession of: he’s a stiff, but with one passion: he’s in love with a dot who’s got the hots for an uninhibited squiggle.
The Dot herself is a really quite imposing, and very… selective. Her insult game suggests a snootiness, used to a life of luxury befitting her rounded, visually satisfying, and mathematically perfect shape.
Despite the line’s seemingly rigid personality, he does take on that most crucial trait of the well-written character: he develops over the course of the short, and in wonderful fashion. He learns to let loose and embody all the qualities of the line: crooked, wiggly, zigzagging, springy, spiral, crisscrossed, and so on, and so on, before collapsing in what is clearly a regretful hangover. The abandon might have been a bit much, and so our line becomes not stiff, but stalwart.
What happens next is for you to discover, and though the visuals would be able to work on their own, it’s the humor of Norton Juster’s screenplay that makes The Dot and the Line and develops a connection between the audience and the lifeless projections. Beyond the novelistic approach to the descriptive accompaniment of the narrator, Juster plays on our subconscious assumptions; like a precursor the “Kiki and Bouba” experiment. The context anthropomorphizes the Dot, Line and Squiggle in lock-step with the ‘Benshi’ style storytelling by the narrator. The film went on to win the final Oscar for animated short, including garnering Chuck Jones his only award as producer. This recognition largely comes down to the short’s inception, the brilliant prodding of animation to its anthropomorphic limits that began with the challenge of the script.