I love Bugs Bunny. Elmer Fudd is awesome (and yes, I would vote for him if the Republicans nominated him to run against you-know-who in the next election). Chip and Dale were my heroes as I grew up. Road Runner is all that I have ever aspired to be—thin, charming, successful, the underdog who always ends up on top, the very-truly-run-after . . .

Well, alright, I exagerate slightly. But you get the point—I loved and still love those incredibly cheesy, visually beautiful cartoons with all their slapstick humor set outrageously to classical music. Somehow, inexplicably, I missed one of the best of them until a few weeks ago: Chuck Jones’ ten-minute animated version of Norman Juster’s “The Dot and the Line.”  (That’s the Juster of The Phantom Tollbooth, by the way.)

I won’t offer much of an explanation of the story—it’s basically a simple parable about falling in love, and the effects that falling in love can have. You can watch the video here.

Why do I post this? For one, I find it alternately fascinating and frustrating to compare the more wholesome (what a pity that word should sound so stodgy and reproachful, like “bourgeois” or “oatmeal”!)—the more wholesome TV fare of yesterday to the things we play for children now.

Besides all that, however, I liked the particulars what the film had to say. We human beings are pretty slow about doing what we know we have to do. We know, for example, that we ought to make an effort in our prayer life—yet how many of us do try to do more than say a Morning Offering and an Act of Contrition at night? So it is with everything else. When we begin to love someone—and this applies to friendships and acquaintances, as well as to romantic love—we tend to respond first with the hopelessness of the Line. (You haven’t watched the video yet, have you?) We shy away from exposing ourselves, partly because we’re lazy and dread the inevitable changes that any new relationship necessitates, but even more because we are afraid of failing. “To love at all is to be vulnerable,” Lewis wrote; to love and to put ourselves out because of that love makes us doubly so. But even when we fail it’s rather good practice. It makes us more humble; it makes us more beautiful—so that, even when we don’t “get what we wanted” we are better off than before—better off by being better, rather than by having something better. It begins to look like another one of God’s tricks . . .