Breaking conventions can sometimes pay off, like in these two very popular movies:

The Lion King

• As the audience, we are not rooting for Simba’s major goals. First he wants to be king, but we don’t want him to grow up yet or for his father to die. (It’s actually a discarded goal.) Then he wants to run away and never look back, but we want him to go back to save the Pride Lands. We don’t like his goals until the last 15 minutes, but we still like him.
• Act 1 is half the movie! The triggering action is when Mufasa dies and Simba runs away, which is after 41 minutes out of 83 minutes total. Usually Act 1 is 10-15 minutes in this genre. Disney solved this problem with a mini-story about going to the elephant graveyard and getting attacked by the hyenas. But that mini-story resolves happily, and no clear conflict remains, just a vague threat of Scar wanting to take over.
• In Act 2, Simba has no goal other than to run away from his guilt. When he learns from Nala how bad things are back home in the last 22 minutes, he doesn’t want to do anything. Only when Rafiki leads him to his father’s ghost in the last 15 minutes does he have a goal to save the pride. Usually the protagonist has a driving goal in the first 15 minutes, not the last 15 minutes.

Cars

• Lightning McQueen risks nothing and has nothing to lose. The stakes are that he really wants to win the Piston Cup and get a bigger sponsor. But if he loses, he’s still at the top of his career with his same sponsor. Most stories have much more risk of losing something.
• There is little urgency. In most of the story, he’s stuck in Radiator Springs, trying to fix the road in time to get to the race by the end of the week, and there are frequent reminders that the clock is ticking. But at some point, those reminders cease as he forms personal connections in the small, quaint town. All this is to develop his internal conflict to make friends, and we don’t mind forgetting about the big race for a while. The theme is that he’s a race car who needs to learn to slow down, and the slowing down actually works in this story!
• Cars is an excellent example of appealing to the whole family. Little kids like the talking car going fast, and Mater is hilarious. But McQueen’s internal conflict is very adult: His life is too fast-paced to stop and appreciate the little things in life. Also, Doc Hudson resents how everyone abandoned him at the end of his career. These are not problems kids can relate to, yet they still like the movie.

What other non-conventional stories should I cover?