Winner of the Academy Award for Animated Short Film in 1965, and adapted from the celebrated book by Norton Juster, best-known for Phantom Tollbooth, this is The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics.
The circle is not the kindest circle around, it’s true, but this Chuck Jones-directed animation is a captivating story on multiple levels: a classic triangle between characters, the exploration of math and shapes – “squares and triangles, hexagons, parallelograms, rhomboids, polyhedrons, trapezoids, parallelepipeds, decagons, tetragrams” and more, as well as an exploration of form, function, and values.
The original book, the updated edition, and the film also all showcase some beautiful 1960s visual design:
Related watching: More math, more shapes, and…
• Chuck Jones draws Bugs Bunny
• Norman McLaren’s pioneering short films
• Charles and Ray Eames’ Mathematica: A World of Numbers… and Beyond
via Brainpickings.
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