About three-quarters of the way through Michel Gondry’s brief, brimming, inspired and liberating new movie, the narrator pauses a tale involving hammock-stealing squirrels to ask, “Where can this story be going?” By this point in the deliriously straight-faced lunacy of Maya, Give Me a Title, the answer is clear: It can be going anywhere. And that’s a good thing.

Maya is Gondry’s daughter and his creative partner in a long-distance project that they shared for six years, beginning when she was 4, and now distilled into this effervescent hourlong feature. Communicating with Maya by phone and computer across many miles, the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director devised an inventive way to stay close: His little girl would be the concept person, called upon to concoct a title for a movie adventure in which she’d star, and Papa would, over the next two to six weeks,...