The shadow of Pixar looms large over In Your Dreams (now on Netflix), and for good reason. Writer/director Alex Woo was a storyboard artist for the heralded animation studio, credited on benchmarks like WALL-E and Ratatouille. For his Netflix debut, Woo borrows some of Pixar’s high-concept narrative engineering for a story about siblings who travel through the worlds of their dreams, hoping to solve their big real-life problems. It’s enjoyable and emotionally poignant – and maybe a little bit familiar. The question is whether it’s worth our time or just leaves us feeling a little, you know, inside out.
The Gist: Life was great for Stevie (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) until (insert record-scratch FZWOOP sound here) her brother came around. Idyllic family breakfasts became chaotic, and Mom (Cristin Milioti) and Dad’s (Simu Liu) attention was divided thanks to Elliot (Elias Janssen). To make matters worse, Stevie, a bit of a type-A neatnik overachiever, has to share a room with Elliot, a disheveled hair-sticking-up-all-over-the-place kid with a bit of a mischievous streak – think Bart and Lisa, and you’re in the right sibling-dynamic ballpark. We hear Stevie’s inner monologue, and she calls her little brother “the disaster.”
In their life B.P. – before procreation – Mom and Dad were a musical duo. They don’t sing together anymore. Nor do they harmonize well in terms of their relationship. Dad is a sorta-almost layabout type who toils away writing songs and making an album. Mom is an educator with a bigger-paycheck job offer for an assistant-prof position all the way in Duluth. In conversations that they hope the kids don’t overhear even though the sharper ones always do – read: Stevie – they both worry about getting the bills paid, and wonder if Mom might just end up moving away, leaving the family split apart. Angst, sadness: Stevie doesn’t know what to do about this besides despair.
When Stevie and Elliot come across a magical tome about dreams, and specifically the mythical character of the Sandman, they suddenly find themselves whisked away to the wild, funny, scary worlds of their dreams and nightmares. One of the hey-let’s-just-throw-it-in-there-because-it’s-dream-logic rules of the movie allows them to exist in the same dreams, where Elliot’s long-lost best-pal stuffie, an adorably belligerent giraffe named Baloney Tony (Craig Robinson), becomes their sidekick on journeys through wacky and/or frightening dreamscapes as they quest to find the Sandman (Omid Djalili). Apparently Stevie believes the King of Dreams can prevent their family from fracturing. I’m not so sure about your reasoning there, Lou, but if that doesn’t work out, maybe the kids will learn some valuable life lessons instead.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? As far as Netflix’s original animated films go, In Your Dreams is about on par with Orion and the Dark in the sense that it’s creative and entertaining, but a shade too Pixar-coded to be truly original. Toy Story and Inside Out loom large, with winks in the general direction of Shrek, Aladdin and Studio Ghibli masterpieces Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro. Oh, and there’s a reference to The Shining, too.
Performance Worth Watching Hearing: Robinson is the designated scene-stealer, and he fulfilled his duties by making me laugh my butt off. Sure, it’s essentially a derivation of Eddie Murphy’s Donkey in Shrek, but you’ll be giggling too much to be niggling about originality.
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: “Make us a happy family again,” Stevie pleads when she finally earns an audience with the powerful Sandman, and your heart can’t help but break a little. In Your Dreams smartly modulates its emotional oomph, rendering it tangible and poignant without being overly sentimental or schmaltzy. That’s the Pixar influence, although it gratefully doesn’t get So Very Pixar that it makes you mad that it made you cry. Woo nails the tricky tone and maintains focus on the story’s simplest, most directly effective component: the sweet, tender sibling relationship that exists beneath the agitation of the personality clash. You honestly believe that Stevie and Elliot will get through life’s difficulties because they have each other.
Outside this rock-solid core, the film tends to be scattered and unfocused, taking essentially the first two acts to get to the heart of the story, where its bigger ideas about truth and delusion, and the nature of happiness, take hold. As Stevie learns that perfection is unattainable and change is inevitable – hard lessons for a young teen – she finds herself in a somewhat bromidic race-against-time/wait-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop third act that tosses her through a few different looking glasses with a loosey-goosey make-it-up-as-you-go-along feel to it (I’ll make an excuse for the Woo and co-scripters Erik Benson and Stanley Moore: dream logic, baby!). If only the needle drops were similarly unpredictable, as the film trots out, of course, Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” and, of course of course, the Chordettes’ “Mr. Sandman.”
As a looming, morally wobbly figure, the Sandman is frustratingly generic, an Oz (as in The Wizard of) type without much real character; I’d rather spend time with the little Miyakazi-inspired soot-sprites-but-they’re-sand creatures that do his bidding. But the world he shapes is clever, otherworldly eye candy, ranging from Bedknobs and Broomsticks flying beds to M.C. Escheresque landscapes and an excursion through a ball-pit river populated with pizza-funcenter-style plushie mascots, a scene that’s like the Disney ‘It’s a Small World’ ride gone utterly bats. You might be able to pull metaphors from the variety of figments here if you try hard enough, but purely as wacky animated art, it’ll tickle your cockles nicely.
Our Call: In Your Dreams is rock-solid, gently substantive, frequently funny family entertainment. It looks good, has something meaningful to say and will make you wish Baloney Tony was your spirit animal. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
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