A young girl and her little brother try to fix their family by venturing into the realm of dreams in this animated adventure
As a former animator for Pixar, Alex Woo’s résumé is as impressive as it comes, including work on such hit films as Ratatouille, WALL-E, Finding Dory and Incredibles 2. Now, Woo makes his directorial debut with In Your Dreams, an animated fantasy adventure with a powerful message, following a pair of siblings on a fantastical journey to fix their family.
When 12-year-old Stevie (voiced by Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) and her younger brother, Elliot (Elias Janssen), discover a magical picture book that says the Sandman can make any dream a reality, they embark on a life-affirming journey into the realm of dreams in order to track down the mythical figure. Longing to make their family perfect, the duo urgently wish for it to come true.
“One of my favourite things to do as a kid was to wake my brother up in the middle of the night and annoy him with accounts of my weird and crazy dreams,” Woo told Netflix’s Tudum. “When I had the opportunity to make my first feature film, I knew exactly what it was going to be about.”
Woo, who co-wrote and co-directed In Your Dreams with fellow Pixar alum Erik Benson, was thrilled when his freshman film attracted some top talent, including Simu Liu and Cristin Miloti as the siblings’ parents, Gia Carides as Nightmare, Omid Djalili as the Sandman, and The Office alum Craig Robinson as a sarcastic stuffed giraffe named Baloney Tony.
At its core, the movie “is about the power of dreams and especially the power of dreaming together,” Woo explained. “When I started this film, I set out to tell a heartfelt story that explored the magical and often hilariously absurd world of dreams,” Woo continued. “What I didn’t expect was how memorable and emotional the performances were going to be. I guess that’s what happens when you’re lucky enough to have Simu Liu and Craig Robinson in your cast. Talk about a dream come true! But what I’m most excited for audiences to experience is Stevie and Elliot’s sibling story — the bickering, the bonding, and everything in between. It’s ultimately why we share our weird and crazy dreams.”
Benson, the film’s co-director and co-writer, told Tudum he was drawn to the story “because it explores that universal idea of searching for perfect moments. We all have dreams of how our life will be, but reality rarely matches up. This film is about that tension: how we imagine our lives versus how things actually turn out.”
As Woo told The Hollywood Reporter, the story’s origins lie in his own childhood experience, when his mother abruptly left and he and his brother concocted a series of “crazy schemes” to try and bring her back home.
“We had this fantastic world, which is the world of dreams, right? But we had to figure out: How do we ground it in real-world stakes, and that was the big question,” Woo explained. “And it wasn’t until I came up with the story — this autobiographical story of my mom leaving for a little while — that we were like, ‘Oh, that’s an incredibly universal and relatable want for a character.’ And if she can go into the dream world and somehow make her dreams come true, then you can connect her journey in the dream world to her desire and her problems in the real world. That was the moment that we felt like we bridged those two worlds and made them connected, which I think cracked the story.”
Even though the film is set in the dream realm, Woo felt it was still important to keep everything rooted in reality. “Every dream world that they visited, or every dream they had, had to be set up or connected to something they experienced in the real world,” Woo explained. “We didn’t want to create a dream world that was just some weird, fantastical, absurd place with no connection to reality, because that’s not how our dreams work. My dreams are usually replays of events from the day — sometimes not literal, sometimes symbolic or metaphorical — but there’s always some rooting in real-world experience. That was one of our key conceptual rules or guidelines.”
In Your Dreams begins streaming Friday, November 14, on Netflix