100 Greatest Animated Shorts / The Dot and the Line / Chuck Jones
USA / 1965
The Dot and the Line won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1965. It was directed by Chuck Jones and adapted from the book by Norton Juster, an architect and children’s writer. This short is perhaps the ultimate in stripped-down geometric modernism in animation, reducing the characters in a love story to literally a dot and a line, but still somehow managing to be stylish and entertaining, perhaps saying as much about human relationships as the entire output of Jane Austin.
In the early 1960s Chuck Jones moonlighted from Warner Brothers on the UPA feature film Gay Puree (1962) that he and his wife had written. In an unfortunate twist of fate, Warner Bros then acquired the distribution rights to the film, found out about this secret work and fired Jones after almost three decades of legendary service.
This wasn’t the only time in that period that Chuck Jones had worked for other companies or been involved in films with a conscious modernist look rather than the traditional Warner Bros rounded style he is associated with. Jones worked for UPA in 1944 on the Roosevelt campaign film Hell Bent for Election sponsored by the United Auto Workers union which, like his earlier 1942 short The Dover Boys, and the later The Dot and the Line is considered a high point in modernist design for animation. Jones also briefly worked for Disney on their own major stab at modernism Sleeping Beauty (1959), after Warner Bros temporarily closed its animation studio in 1953.
After leaving Warner Bros in 1962 Jones formed his own company Sib Tower 12, taking most of his team with him from the disintegrating Warner’s animation studios, including writer Michael Maltese and layout artist and designer Maurice Noble. After Jones’s company made Tom and Jerry shorts for MGM for a while, MGM bought them out and amalgamated them into their own animation studio. The Dot and the Line was made for MGM during this period.
Narrated by Robert Morley, the film’s funny and clever story tells of a boring straight line in love with a graceful round dot, who unfortunately would rather hang round with a crazy jazz dancing squiggle. Eventually the dot tires with the antics of the unruly and unreliable squiggle and the line manages to win the object of his affections by learning how to relax, bend and impress the dot with perfect geometric shapes.
In 1969 Jones adapted another of Juster’s books The Phantom Tollbooth into a psychedelic live action/animation feature that, although commercially unsuccessful, has become a bit of a cult film and oddball curiosity piece.
Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is an list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome but please don’t shoot us, it’s only a list!