I love this movie so much

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The date of release on this short subject cartoon was Dec. 31, 1965. It strikes me as an early cartoon look at computers and the logic of the digital age – well before their commercial time. It reminded me also of the Morse Code which had been invented in 1836 (and I studied as a youth and later in the U.S. Army). Of course, here the mathematics is all geometrics. And, hidden within the cartoon is social commentary, a moral of sorts."The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics" is a splendid cartoon. It's from a story by Norton Juster. The humor of the dialog read by Robert Morley is quite good. It's a delight to watch the various contortions – like a child drawing lines and angles in a frenzy on paper. The line is the "hero" of this piece. He finally wins over the dot (the heroine?) when she sees through the unkempt and disheveled character of the squiggle. I could see variations on this pattern – a cartoon of dots and dashes. How about "binary beginnings." Or maybe, "logic bent out of shape?"It's a pretty sophisticated and somewhat educational cartoon. It won the 1965 Oscar as the best short (cartoon). I probably saw it in a theater originally, but saw it again a couple of times in recent years. It came as a bonus on my DVD of "The Glass Bottom Boat." I think most viewers will enjoy this artistic short. It's a cartoon that has more than one angle.

I truly have to admire the works of Chuck Jones. He made a name for himself directing Bugs Bunny shorts for Warner Brothers starting in the 1940's (although he directed many other animated shorts during that era,including animated training films for the U.S. government,some of which featured scripts written by Theodore S.Geisel,later to be known & loved by generations as Dr.Suess),moving on to creating The Road Runner in the 1950's,and moving on even further to working on directing animated programs for television in the 1960's,to animated feature fare in the 1970's. Every now & again, he would surprise us with something different & left of centre. 'The Dot And The Line:A Romance In Lower Mathematics',a short he directed for M-G-M in 1965 is a shining example of this. The story (read by veteran British actor,Robert Morley)is simple:a straight line is madly in love with a dot,who only cares for an abstract squiggle line. This causes the line to re-evaluate his position on things. The concept of abstract animation is by no means a new idea, but Jones (with assistance from co-director/co-writer Maurice Noble)manage to pull it off nicely (the idea for animating abstract images actually hearkens back to silent films in the 1920's,and later augmented by classical music in the 1930's & beyond). Well worth seeking out if you're idea of animation is something that is exclusively for children.

When I first read the book version of the Dot and the Line, I had to supply the voice and "music" in my imagination, but I thought the book was wonderful. Just a few lines on a page and some words, but it really was romance. The justification for the characters' behavior was so real! I felt for the Line from the very beginning, and hated his rival. My feelings for the Dot were mixed. I just kept wishing she would come to her senses and see the Line for the great guy that he really was! When I was able to view the animated version a few years later, I was happy to see that my own interpretation was pretty much spot-on. I did enjoy the music, and I enjoyed seeing my characters come to "life" as it were. The movie was a faithful rendering of the book, which to me is still a classic! I lent my copy to a friend over ten years ago, and have not gotten it back yet...it is still making the rounds and I hope, making many other people smile.

Experimental animators usually commit the mistake of thinking that experimentalism must be hermetical, non-objective, and abstract. Chuck Jones proves his point by making an animation film which brings characters and a storyline, but makes it look like a wild piece of experimental animation.Without sound, the film would look like wild moving pieces. It's the narration and the soundtrack who do the trick. Weird non-objective mathematically abstract images who become human-like characters just with a little voice and music. Brilliant.I'm personally impressed by this piece, since I saw it on TV as a kid, and instead of learning mathematics out of it, I decided to be an experimental animator. And I am one now :)