A Little Night Magic: ‘In Your Dreams’ Director Alex Woo & Team Uncover the Beautifully Crafted Netflix Movie

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“I wanted to show that, like life, dreams can have a dark side to them. If you focus too much on them, you can kind of miss the reality that’s sort of right in front of your eyes.”

— Writer-director-producer Alex Woo

Though we might chase our dreams with real passion, believing and hoping they’ll be realized, not every one of them will come true. And at that point, we’ll inevitably wonder, what’s next?

This is where In Your Dreams, the new original film from director Alex Woo, a former Pixar storyboard artist (Ratatouille, WALL-E, Incredibles 2, Finding Dory), takes us. We follow Stevie and her little brother Elliot through two worlds — an edgy, imperfect reality and a fantasy landscape — as they try to bring them together and live the perfect lives they desperately want.

“What started the movie was this question of: What do you do when your dreams don’t necessarily come true?” says Woo. “I think that’s so much a part of life, how do you find a way forward [amid the] uncertainty and unknown? That was sort of the thing that kept coming back to me and that was sort of the throughline of the film. But we also wanted to make sure it was really fun, and that you just enjoyed every single second of the film. And so that was also a challenge, but in a way that’s really fun and entertaining.”

The film, co-directed by Erik Benson, is the first animated feature from Woo’s Berkeley, California-based KuKu Studios, which he co-founded in 2016 with fellow former Pixar employees Stanley Moore and Tim Hahn and which produced Netflix’s preschool show Go! Go! Cory Carson. Woo developed the story for this film and co-wrote the screenplay with Benson and Moore.

The director’s team includes VFX supervisor and director of CG supervision at Sony Pictures Imageworks Nicola Lavender, head of character animation Sacha Kapijimpanga (Over the Moon), two-time Academy Award-winning production designer Steve Pilcher (Soul) and producers Tim Hahn and Netflix Animation co-founder Gregg Taylor. There’s also a powerhouse voice cast featuring Jolie Hoang-Rappaport, Elias Janssen, Craig Robinson, Simu Liu, Cristin Milioti, Omid Djalili, Gia Carides, SungWon Cho and Zachary Noah Piser, among others.

Straddling Two Distinct Worlds

Woo says that the animation and storytelling had to reflect two worlds — a dream world and the real world. The director and his creative team set out to make each world seem unique so viewers could easily distinguish one from the other.

“It was important to us that the real world seem grounded for the audience and the characters,” says Woo. “We needed to ground the design of the real world so that there was somewhere for us to go when we got to the dream world. We also played some tricks on the audience, where you think you’re in the real world, but you’re in the dream world. Again, you needed that contrast. But it comes back to the theme of the movie, which is that reality is imperfect, reality is messy, and it’s not perfectly [a] straight line and straight edges. You know, things are dirty, but that’s the beauty of reality. So, it was very deliberate to have all these sorts of tactile imperfections when you see them.”

As production designer, Pilcher collaborated closely with Woo to ensure that audiences could tell the worlds apart as the two young characters travel back and forth.

“You wanted to make sure that it’s clear to the audience when you’re in the real world or the dream world,” says Pilcher. “When I look at the story, I don’t necessarily think about stylistic considerations right off the bat. I think about what the story is asking for, and that will tell me how to stylistically approach things. So, in this film, because we have a real world and a dream world, you want to make sure that sometimes when you’re in the dream world, it feels like you’re still in the real world. This makes the dream world more convincing. I made sure that the real world was relatable and fun and tactile. When we go to the dream world, it’s different. The characters can do what they want, the rules are different.”

According to the film’s head of character animation, Sacha Kapijimpanga, the most challenging character was Nightmara, a powerful phantom who lives in that dream world.

“We knew she was going to be a challenge because she was pretty effects-heavy as well,” says Kapijimpanga. “She was so complicated that we could have started working on her on the first day, and we still would have been working on her till the end. There were little changes in terms of what she was going to be saying in the movie, in the direction of her character a little bit, until late in production.

“We ended up really doing a lot of the work in Maya in the last four months of the movie,” he adds. “We had some development work before that, but there was a lot of collaboration that had to happen between all the departments because she’s so effects-heavy that you can’t represent her with a regular body geometry. So, you have to figure out how to show all that stuff in a way that can be directed. It was a lot of, like, back and forth between departments. That was probably the most collaborative character, I think.”

Lavender, the film’s VFX supervisor, agrees that Nightmara brought on many complications but says that Sandman, another character who lives in the dream world and is made of sand, added to the mix of challenges.

“We did use existing software packages for Sandman and Nightmara, though; it was more shaders that we used in there to make sure that we had the control that we needed,” says Lavender. “There were a lot of aspects of the dream world that were also very complicated, like all the sand around them, the sandcastle that’s so huge, and then the Sandman himself, which is much smaller, and then even [the] little, smaller characters made of sand. We spent time making sure that the shaders that we had could manage those different scales and allow us to kind of layer in all the detail that we needed. We spent a lot of time mainly working with the shader department to kind of add features and to allow us to use those features in different ways to show emotion and action.”

Embracing the Yin and Yang

In the dream world, main characters Stevie and Elliot don’t always encounter safe spaces or friends. Both Sandman and Nightmara force them into struggles. And this all worked toward Woo’s ultimate goal.

“I wanted to show that, like life, dreams can have a dark side to them,” says Woo. “If you focus too much on them, you can kind of miss the reality that’s sort of right in front of your eyes. Even though it’s messy and it’s complicated, it’s real, and that’s what life is. The messiness that happens in life makes [you] grow. People spend so much time on social media, projecting out into the world these fake, perfect lives. I get caught up in this too. You almost want to create a perfect dream life for yourself, and then you want to put that out into the world. You’re missing out on the reality and all the goodness and richness of real life.”

In Your Dreams premieres November 14 on Netflix.

Baloney Tony and Other Childhood Memories

In Your Dreams is full of familiar family moments. Whether it’s siblings fighting one moment and then comforting each other the next, or parents arguing when they think their kids aren’t listening. Director Alex Woo didn’t have to look far for inspiration for these scenes.

“The very opening, when Stevie (the main character) is woken up by hearing her parents argue downstairs, that’s straight out of my life when I was a kid,” says Woo. “There’s also a scene where Stevie watches her mom drive away to Duluth for an interview, and that also was straight out of my life.”

In the film, Stevie and her brother Elliot also share a stuffed animal they’ve named Baloney Tony, because they use a rip in his side to store lunch meat. This also came from a moment in the director’s life.

“My brother didn’t exactly have a Baloney Tony, but my aunt bought us these matching stuffed bears. They were called Santa bears, and they were from the local department store. And my brother had, like, a bloody nose one night and he wiped his nose on the bear, around his tail. I would always make fun of him for it, but he just still loved the bear, and it was his bear, so he didn’t want to get rid of it and still slept with it. I wanted to bring that sense of closeness between two kids to the movie,” Woo recalls.

“My little brother also always wanted to come over to my side of the room when we shared a bedroom. When you see Elliot following Stevie around and trying to get in her space, it comes from the experiences I had with my brother. You also see how they can depend on each other when they’re worried or scared in the story.”

Alex Woo will be attending the 2025 World Animation Summit (Nov. 17-19) both as one of this year’s Hall of Fame Award winners and a featured panelist. Learn more at animationmagazine.net/summit.