Sunday, October 04, 2015

The Best Book Summary award

Zwei of my anchor points - Chuck Jones, Flatland - intersect in The Dot and the Line, a book by Norton Juster. With "A Romance in Lower Mathematics" for a tagline, I continued on the wiki.

Here's how the story goes
The story details a straight line who is hopelessly in love with a dot. The dot, finding the line to be stiff, dull, and conventional, turns her affections toward a wild and unkempt squiggle. The squiggle then takes advantage of the line's stiffness by reminding him that he's a lot more fun for the dot. The line's friends tried to get him to settle down with another female line, but he refuses. He tries to dream of greatness until he finally understands what the squiggle meant and decides that he needs to by mysterious and unconventional. Willing to do whatever it takes to win the dot's affection, the line manages to bend himself and form an angle. He works to refine this new ability, creating shapes so complex that he has to label his sides and angles to keep his place. When competing again, the squiggle claims that the line still has nothing to show for the dot. He proves his rival wrong and is able to show the dot what she's really worth with him. She realizes that she has made a mistake after seeing what the line was really offering her. The dot wondered what she had thought she has seen in the squiggle to be freedom and joy was nothing more than chaos and sloth. The squiggle tries to reclaim her love, but finds himself out of shape. Fed up, the dot tells him off how she really feels about him. She leaves with the line, having realized that he has much more to offer, and the punning moral is presented: "To the vector belong the spoils."

On the movie
In 1965, famed animator Chuck Jones and the MGM Animation/Visual Arts studio worked with Norton Juster to adapt The Dot and the Line into a 10-minute animated short film for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, narrated by Robert Morley with the narration almost verbatim to the book. The Dot and the Line won the 1965 Academy Award for Animated Short Film.[1] It was entered into the Short Film Palme d'Or competition at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival.[2]

No comments: