Polygon’s list of the best animated movies of 2024 is full of the best animation from around the world, ranging from surreal French movies to Pixar sequels. My top three personal favorites were The Wild Robot, Flow, and Robot Dreams. All three are vastly stylistically different, which definitely appealed to me. But there was something else I felt tied the three of them together in my head, making them a perfect triple feature of not just three good films, but also three thematically harmonious ones.

I broke it down into this handy-dandy Venn diagram:

Robot Dreams and Flow are both silent movies, with a lot of emphasis on the characters’ physicality and how they express themselves without words. Survival adventure Flow is very grounded in how real animals move, to the point where even the more unrealistic actions seem like they could happen if the cat was really damn smart. Robot Dreams, however, takes........

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