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. Taking advantage of the line's stiffness, the squiggle rubs it in that he is a lot more fun for the dot. The depressed line's friends try to get him to settle down with a female line, but he refuses. He tries to dream of greatness until he finally understands what the squiggle means, and decides to be more unconventional. Willing to do whatever it takes to win the dot's affection, the line manages to bend himself and form angle after angle until he is nothing more than a mess of sides, bends and angles. After he straightens himself out, he settles down and focuses more responsibly on this new ability, creating shapes so complex that he has to label his sides and angles in order to keep his place. When competing again, the squiggle claims that the line still has nothing to show to the dot. The line proves his rival wrong and is able to show the dot what she is really worth to him. When she sees this, the dot realizes that her relationship with the squiggle has been a mistake; that what she had thought was freedom and joy was nothing more than chaos and sloth. The squiggle makes an effort to reclaim her love by trying to do what the line did, but to no avail, as no matter how hard he tries to re-shape himself, he still remains the same tangled, chaotic mess of lines and curves. Fed up, the dot tells him how she really feels about him, denouncing the squiggle as meaningless, undisciplined, insignificant, and out of luck. She leaves with the line, having accepted that he has much more to offer, and the punning moral is presented: "To the vector belong the spoils."
Authorship
Though listed as being directed by Chuck Jones, the true acting director was Maurice Noble according to his own recollection, Noble being the long-term background artist and eventually credited co-director on numerous projects with Jones. Chuck Jones was one of the originators for the adaptation and did the first treatment for the short. However the results did not please the producers who asked Maurice Noble to take over, heavily vexing Jones. Noble recalls the passation happening somewhat dramatically as “Chuck, with a big scowl on his face, came in and threw all the pieces on my big brown bookcase; he stacked the whole picture like this: plunk, plunk, plunk...and stalked out of the room.”
