By Kai Curry
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
First stories are often at least partly autobiographical. That is the case for director and co-writer Alex Woo’s movie, “In Your Dreams.” This animated film tells a story about two siblings that are very familiar to Woo, and very special to him as the first feature film from Woo’s Kuku Studios.
Formerly a Story Lead at Pixar and a Director in Development at Lucasfilm, Woo, along with Tim Hahn and Stanley Moore, formed Kuku Studios in 2016. With “In Your Dreams,” Woo hopes to challenge American assumptions about what it means to live our best lives and the pressure that people feel to get everything right. Oftentimes, this psychology starts in childhood.
“Stevie” (voiced by Jolie Hoang-Rappaport, mostly, and Hailey Magpali), the older sister in “In Your Dreams,” is weighed down by responsibility. Her parents (voiced by Simu Liu and Cristin Milioti) seem to be headed for separation, and Stevie believes that this is something she can do something about. Like Woo, Stevie is a perfectionist, which shows in everything she does. Her little brother, Elliot (voiced by Elias Janssen), in contrast, is a total wild card.
“It’s a lot based on my family,” Woo said. Woo and his brother tried to do everything they could to keep their family together, Woo shared. Eventually, just like Stevie, Woo had to learn that everything is not perfect, he is not perfect, and his parents are not perfect. “It was a big wake up call,” Woo said.
Elliot (left) and Stevie (right) learn how to be a team.
In the movie, this life lesson comes through the world of dreams and nightmares. Rambunctious Elliot finds a magical book, titled “Legend of the Sandman, the Giver of Dreams.” The book gets it into Stevie’s head that if she can find this “Sandman,” then she can ask him to make her dream come true, to keep her parents and her family together. Ideally, Stevie would like to accomplish this without her pesky little brother in tow. However, it turns out that the two siblings are psychically linked, and so must embark on the adventure as a team.
To give you an idea of their ways of thinking, when they ask each other what their ultimate dream would be, Stevie lies that she wants her own room, when really, it’s that she wants her family to be one happy unit (like they were before Elliot appeared, is sometimes suggested). Elliot says he wants a fist of dynamite lol. When brother and sister start having the same dreams, and nightmares, Stevie will wake up exclaiming, “That was awful!” Elliot: “That was awesome!”
This dynamic follows that of Woo and his brother, Woo told the Northwest Asian Weekly.
“My brother is very much an Elliot. He’s really charming…He’s really funny.” Woo’s brother, like Elliot, may not seem to be a very serious person, yet, as Woo described, “there’s a wisdom to the way he [and Elliot] lives life” that Woo had to learn. Stevie, too, unwillingly most of the time, learns from Elliot to let go. She learns to appreciate the positive aspects of Elliot’s nature.
I found a lot of echoes of the movie “Labyrinth” in this film: the older sister who despises looking after her little brother, and wishes for a different life. The person, or entity, she seeks rescue from is, like “Jared” in “Labyrinth,” ambiguous. There’s also a nod to Escher’s staircases. “Enter Sandman.” That’s a song (by Metallica) that I had in my head for much of this movie. “The Sandman” (voiced by Omid Djalili) in this film is a fresh version of the age-old mythical character. He looks and acts like Santa Claus, and yet you wonder, what’s the bargain?
You would be correct to be suspicious, yet Stevie is so blinded by her one goal that she races ahead incautiously to reach the Sandman and ask for a perfect life. As with all wishes, it’s best to be careful what you wish for. In their search for the Sandman, Elliot and Stevie navigate a topsy-turvy world of dreams, and face Nightmara (voiced by Gia Carides), who is seemingly the opposite of the Sandman. But Nightmara represents something necessary in life: hard times.
“Life is meaningful when you deal with the messiness of life together with the people you love,” Woo suggested. Life has ups and downs, and that’s okay. Even failing to achieve a dream is okay.
It’s good to have goals, Woo said, yet that can go overboard, causing a person to get lost in the pursuit and neglect other aspects of their life. In our society, there is a pressure to achieve our dreams, to constantly be living our best life. People who are unable to do so (or think they are), feel like they’ve failed, Woo continued.
“I want to change the conversation and ground dreams a little bit,” he said. Woo is fascinated with the world of dreams, and used “In Your Dreams” as a platform for exploring the various aspects of the dream world (and the meanings of the word). “Don’t you just love dreams?” the Sandman asks. “They show you how perfect the world could be…” “Can’t you just make my family happy again,” Stevie asks. It’s a deal. With some caveats.
In a way, Stevie doesn’t want to “wake up”; she doesn’t want to face reality. She wants to stay in her dream of a perfect family when, actually, her family is already as perfect as it can be. Life can be scary. Change is scary. The Sandman might legitimately want everyone to be happy, yet the price to pay is not necessarily healthy. “No matter what happens, we will always love you, and we will always be a family,” says Stevie’s mom.
Stevie (left), Tony Baloney, and Elliot (right) embark into a world of dreams.
The animation is really great. I was mesmerized by Stevie’s luxuriously flowing hair. I loved the Sandman’s castle and the way the Sandman’s robe fanned out into a mist of sand. I didn’t really love the lowbrow humor provided mainly by Elliot’s stuffed toy, “Tony Baloney” (voiced by Craig Robinson). Tony farts lasers (okay that’s a little bit funny) and sometimes spouts some wisdom, like, “If you try to find the Sandman, your dream will 100% turn into a nightmare.” But he’s also way too sexified, which seemed unnecessary, gyrating to the tune of “Hungry Eyes,” and such. He was like “Donkey” from “Shrek,” but even more without a filter. The dream sequences were weird, of course, yet I did not expect an animated piece of pizza to sing, “Dontcha wish your pizza was hot like me? Dontcha wish your pizza was a freak like me?”
Okay, maybe I’m a fuddy duddy.
Like Stevie, Woo knows that his perfectionism is something he will have to manage for the rest of his life. Even this movie, he said, was hard to give up. When he was at Pixar, he told the Northwest Asian Weekly, instead of saying that a movie was finished, they would say that it had been “taken away” from them. Woo could have kept working on “In Your Dreams” indefinitely. Instead, he released it out into the real world to help us think about what it means to dream.
“I’m so proud of it and I am so happy with how it turned out,” Woo said.
“In Your Dreams” arrives on Netflix on Nov. 14.
Kai can be reached at newstips@nwasianweekly.com.
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