Directed by Alex Woo and Erik Benson, and produced by Timothy Hahn and Gregg Taylor, In Your Dreams follows a pair of siblings who navigate the magically absurd world of their dreams in search of the mythical Sandman, hoping he can grant their ultimate wish: the perfect family.
The adventure centers on Stevie (voiced by Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) and her younger brother Elliot (Elias Janssen), two polar opposites whose bickering gives way to unexpected teamwork when they tumble into their subconscious. Their surreal quest introduces them to such dreamscape oddities as a sarcastic stuffed giraffe named Baloney Tony (Craig Robinson), zombie breakfast foods, a man-eating hot dog and the queen of nightmares herself.
Woo, who left Pixar a decade ago to found startup Kuku Studios, introduced the film as a work in progress to the Annecy audience on Wednesday. He said the story of In Your Dreams came from a deeply personal place, specifically a formative moment in his childhood when his mother abruptly left home and he and his brother came up with “crazy schemes” to try and bring her back.
The voice cast also includes Simu Liu and Cristin Milioti as the kids’ parents, Omid Djalili as the Sandman, and Gia Carides as Nightmara. Production design is by Steve Pilcher, with VFX supervised by Nicola Lavender and animation led by Sebastian Kapijimpanga.
Gregg Taylor, a veteran of DreamWorks and Netflix Animation, produced the feature together with Tim Hahn, another Pixar alum, who previously collaborated with Woo on the Netflix preschool series Go! Go! Cory Carson.
Woo, Pilcher and Nicola Lavender sat down with The Hollywood Reporter at Annecy to talk about dream logic, late night pizza inspiration and the case for animated originals: “With all this IP flooding the market, it might actually be a great time to pitch originals.”
You spoke a bit in your presentation about the pizza box moment when you cracked the idea for this film. Take me back to that breakthrough.
Alex Woo: Yeah. I mean, I sort of alluded to it in the presentation. But, you know, 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. And it wasn’t until I came up with the story — this autobiographical story of my mom’s from 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. So that was what we were writing on the pizza box. And then on the other side —which we don’t have a picture of — we drew like, “Oh, this is how the dream world functions,” like the structure of the dream world. But there was all this cheese and grease stains, so we through that out.
And so how long was it then from that pizza box moment to green light?
Woo: So that was 2017, like around November, and then green light was January 2020 — two months before the pandemic. So yeah, it was like three years before we got the green light. But we were very busy working on our first production, which was Go! Go! Cory Carson. I don’t know if you’ve seen that, but that kept us very busy. So we came up with the pitch for In Your Dreams, and we got the green light for Go! Go! Cory Carson, so we kind of had to put that on the shelf while we finished our series. And then after we finished the first season, Netflix expanded into feature animation, and they asked us, “Hey, do you guys have any feature ideas?” We were like, “Funny you should ask,” pitched it to them, and they loved it.
One of the big challenges of doing something in the dream world is that there are theoretically no boundaries. How did you create boundaries and rules for the dream world?
Woo: I can talk about this conceptually. 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. 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.
Steve Pilcher: That’s sort of the universal, overall emotional driver for the whole thing. Sometimes we got into sets like Breakfast Town or the Ball Pit River, which were more whimsical, but they still related to something in the real world. In Breakfast Town, for example, all the little characters are breakfast foods — they’re alive — but the rest of the town isn’t made out of food. It’s crafted from things like milk cartons, popsicle sticks, materials kids would use for crafts. We avoided cliché, like a castle made of waffles.
And then we added a twist — French toast — so we made it kind of medieval. Used a Hansel-and-Gretel-type color palette. So yes, we set up rules because they nurture creativity and provide parameters. They’re not there to create stagnation. We used that across almost every set.
You illustrated the Sandcastle set as well.
Pilcher: Everything is sand — everything’s made of sand. The idea was to root everything in that material. From that grounding, we created variations, like melting sand into gl***, which is what the globe and kaleidoscope ship above it are made from. It’s always a balancing act, never 50/50. When it works, you just know.
What was the biggest visual effects challenge in the film?
Nicola Lavender: We kind of touched on it last night, but it was the sheer variety of environments and characters. It was a very effects-heavy show. You saw some of it last night with things like the Ball Pit River and storms.
You haven’t seen it yet, but there are a couple of very effects-heavy characters that took months of development and back-and-forth. We had to ensure Alex and Steve had control over them. They’re big parts of In Your Dreams, and we’re really proud of how they turned out. Even one of those characters is barely in the film, but it took so much work.
Everything, even the bedroom, has so much detail — textural quality, lighting, depth. It’s not flat or simply shaded. We paid a lot of attention to lighting — having specular highlights, diffuse lighting, shadow — creating a softness that ties back to grounding the dream world in the real world.
Is it difficult to pitch original projects not based on IP?
Woo: Yeah, I think it is difficult, and I understand the economics of it. But you know, Warren Buffett has that quote, “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” When everyone’s doing IP-based stuff, that’s when originals stand out. So with all this IP flooding the market, it might actually be a great time to pitch originals.
Is it surprising that Netflix, of all platforms, supported this, considering the perception of algorithm-based programming?
Woo: I’ve worked with Netflix on two productions over nine years, and I don’t think they use algorithms to decide what to greenlight. That’s a human decision. The executives I’ve worked with have great taste. They might use data to inform choices, but at the end of the day, it’s about the story and whether it will resonate globally. The idea that Netflix is just one giant algorithm makes for good headlines, but it’s not true to reality.
Are you bothered that many people will watch this on small screens instead of the big screen it seems to deserve?
Pilcher: We’d love to see it on the big screen, of course, but it’s just the reality now. People watch things on phones or TVs while doing something else. TVs are huge now anyway. As long as we put the work into the creation, that’s what matters.
Woo: Hopefully, someone starts watching it on their phone and realizes there’s so much richness in the imagery that they switch to a big screen. We can’t control how people watch, but we hope it warrants a bigger screen.
Lavender: We do make sure it works across all formats — big screen, TV, phone. We create different versions to ensure the best experience.
Pilcher: You can actually see more on the big screen — more detail, more experience. What’s a bit lost is the communal audience experience. Watching together in a theater has something primal and fulfilling. You don’t get that on your phone or in your bedroom. But if people love it enough to want that experience, then that’s great.
Netflix will roll out In Your Dreams on Nov. 14.
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