How ‘In Your Dreams’ Pushes CG Animation Style to Differentiate Fantasy and Reality

Director Alex Woo spoke to IndieWire about his inspirations behind the family animated movie, and releasing an animated film in the streaming age.

“In Your Dreams,” a new animated feature from Netflix, is a colorful movie filled with imaginative sights: a world of living breakfast food, a flying bed, a gigantic sand castle in which the legendary Sandman resides. But like the best children’s movies, the actual story is grounded in Earth: The main characters, Stevie (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) and Elliot (Elias Janssen) are ordinary suburban children whose parents (Simu Liu and Cristin Milioti) are dealing with financial trouble that’s straining their marriage. When their mother leaves on a trip, the worried elder child Stevie stumbles upon a book that allows her and her brother to enter a dream world, and embarks on a quest to find the Sandman in a desperate attempt to find a wish that can save her parent’s marriage.

The film is the feature length debut of director Alex Woo, who previously got his start working in the art department and as a storyboard artist for Pixar and Lucasfilm. In 2016, he left Pixar to co-found his own company Kuku Studios, which premiered its first project, Emmy-winning children’s show “Go! Go! Cory Carson” in 2020. Around that time, Woo began work on his idea for an animated film tackling the world of dreams, which he thought was relatively under-explored in the world of animation. To find an emotional core to film, he drew inspiration from his own life, and a time in his childhood where his parents were briefly separated, to inform the storyline.

“The challenge with dreams is that anything can happen, right? How do you ground it with a real world emotional story?,” Woo said in an interview with IndieWire. “And that’s when I told [the team] this story about my mom leaving for a little while, and how devastating that was to me, and how the only thing I wanted in the whole world was for my family to stick together. And that felt like such a grounded, emotional and rootable want for a character and so that, like, the marriage of those two pieces, the package of, like, fantastical dream world and a really grounded story for a character, is what gave birth to ‘In Your Dreams.'”

Ahead of the release of the film, IndieWire spoke to Woo about leaving Pixar for his own studio, the inspirations behind “In Your Dreams,” and his hopes for making a Netflix movie in the wake of the “KPop Demon Hunters” phenomenon.

The following interview was edited and condensed for length and clarity.

IndieWire: “In Your Dreams” is your first feature film. What were the challenges that came from the experience? How do you feel now that it’s coming out?

Alex Woo: The amount of work, I was not prepared for that. I mean, I was happy to do it, but I’ve worked on a lot of features, but never in the seat of the director, and so I have so much more respect for anybody who’s finished a film, because it’s just so much work. There’s just so much on your shoulders, and so many questions that have to be answered, and sometimes you don’t know the answers, and you have to figure out how to find the answers in a timely manner, because the clock is ticking and money’s burning and you’re on a schedule.

You started out at Pixar. What lessons from your work there did you bring to this project?

At Pixar, I was really fortunate to work with Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton and John Lasseter. And what I really took away from them was how every single decision you make has to be rooted in the narrative and the needs of the story of the film. That was something that I had always sort of heard in passing, but to see them do it day in and day out, at every single level, was a tremendous education. It really drilled that philosophy home for me, and I’ve started trying to bring that to every single project that I’ve worked on ever since.

Why did you want to leave Pixar to found your own studio?

I was at Pixar for about 10 years. The first half of my career was, I would say, some of the best creative experiences I’ve had in my life. I got to work on “Ratatouille” and “Wall-E,” which are, I think, some of their best films. The second half of my career there was less inspiring because I worked on a lot of sequels. I worked on “Cars 2,” “Finding Dory” and “Incredibles 2,” and some of those movies are good, but they didn’t have the spark the earlier films that I worked on had. I wanted to do original stories, and I wanted to tell stories that had that sort of creative spark that I felt when I first got to Pixar.

What were some of your influences while making the movie? It feels like it draws from ’80s kids fantasies films, like “The NeverEnding Story” or “Labyrinth.”

I’m so transparent. Those are some of the movies that I grew up with, and they had such a profound effect on me, and they worked their way into my creative DNA. So, my taste has been really shaped by those films. And naturally it just comes out in my work. I think there’s something about those ’80s movies. There was some magic to those films. You got the sense that magic was possible, that it was real. And I wanted to try and capture that feeling in our movie.

What was your vision for the animation style of the film and how you wanted the dream world to depart from the film’s real world?

Right now, in animation, especially, there’s a lot of experimentation with stylization, right? Because it feels like CG reached its logical conclusion in that you can kind of do anything in CG, in terms of the realistic fidelity of an image. And so there’s been a lot of experimentation in such a great way, like “Spider-Verse” looks fantastic, and they’ve really led the charge on that front. There’s a lot of sort of pressure to figure out what your style is and how you’re departing from traditional CG animation. But I didn’t want to take that approach. I didn’t want impose a style and bring a style to the film. Again, what I learned at Pixar is the story has got to drive every decision. So I wanted the needs of the story to drive what the stylization was.

Our film, because the film takes place in both the real world and the dream world, I knew I needed to have sort of a design aesthetic that would allow me to push the dream world design in a certain way. If our real world design was too stylized, there would be nowhere to go with the dream world. So that meant the real world had to be really kind of grounded in its aesthetic, which is how we landed on the design that we currently have. But then when you get to the dream world, we have the license to really push the design. Our film sort of allowed us to get the best of both worlds. You get this some stylization, you get these anime versions of Stevie and Elliot. But in order for that to mean something, you had to contrast it with something that was grounded.

A large portion of this movie was shot during COVID. What were the challenges of that, both practically and psychologically?

I was working for 18 months on a midnight shift, so I worked every night from midnight to 10 am, and it was gnarly. I think I lost, you know, five years of my life doing that. So that was a huge challenge. Psychologically, I mean, it’s just hard to be isolated from your crew. I think so much great art comes from collaboration, and great collaboration is much more effective in person, because there are so many nonverbal cues that you can communicate with.

When you’re on Zoom, there are not very many nonverbal cues that you can use to communicate your ideas. That’s really what directing is about, trying to communicate a vision that you have in your mind to your team. There are so many different ways you can do that. You can do that verbally, which is sort of the most obvious form, but then there’s gesturing and acting things out through movement, and that’s really hard to communicate when you’re not in the same room with each other. Not being in person, I felt like the chemistry of the team wasn’t as strong as I would like it to have been.

How do you feel about “In Your Dreams” being a Netflix release and the fact that most people will see it on their TV instead of in theaters? We did see recently with “KPOP Demon Hunters” that a streaming release can still become a major phenomenon.

As a filmmaker, obviously you love the big screen, right? Who wouldn’t? And we definitely made it with that in mind. So the scope of the filmmaking, the attention to detail, it was made and can hold up on the big screen. But I think consumption patterns have changed, and you have to go where the audience is. And so the other thing that Netflix has, the audience, the subscriber base, is so huge. Just at a push of a button, you can access this entire giant worldwide audience. So that’s very exciting for a filmmaker to be able to have that kind of exposure.

“In Your Dreams” releases in theaters on Friday, November 7 and will start streaming on Netflix on Friday, November 14.