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In 1965, famed animator Chuck Jones and the MGM Animation/Visual Arts studio adapted "The Dot and the Line" intoa 10-minute animated short film for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, narrated by Robert Morley. "The Dot and the Line" won the1965 Academy Award for Animated Short Film. Five years later, Jones turned another Juster book into an animatedfeature film, "The Phantom Tollbooth".
This is the anguished tale of a sensible straight line who falls in love with a dot. The dot, however, finding the line stiff, dull, and conventional, turns her affections toward a wild and unkempt squiggle. Though dejected, the line was notwithout determination, and, after much concentration, managed to bend himself, giving rise to shapes so complex hehad to letter his sides and angles to keep his place. Before long he was able to express himself in any shape hewished, from helices to spider webs to Paul Klee's little jester. Overwhelmed by the line's geometric contortionisticprowess, the dot realized that what she had seen in the squiggle to be freedom and joy was nothing more than chaosand sloth.Thence, the line and the dot lived "if not happily ever after, at least reasonably so." The story ends with apunning moral: "To the vector belong the spoils."
