The threat of parental split as a child inspired writer/director Alex Woo to deepen animated fantasy In Your Dreams
Two siblings journey into the nocturnal land of dreams, looking for a being with the power to make their wishes come true, in animated fantasy In Your Dreams. For its director Alex Woo, making the film required him to become a nocturnal being after he was sequestered in Hong Kong during the pandemic.
“I couldn’t ask my crew to conform to my time zone because there were so many people on the team,” says Woo, who was unable to return to the US due to border closures, having flown to Hong Kong in late 2020 to visit his parents. “I would work from midnight to 10am, prepare for the next day then sleep from three to 11. I did that every day for a year and a half, and it was challenging. The advantage of being at home was my mom cooked for me, so I could focus fully on the movie.”
This was not the first time Woo’s mother had played a role during the development of In Your Dreams: a childhood memory inspired a key part of the plotline. “When I was a kid, my mom left for a while and my parents nearly split up,” the filmmaker tells Screen International. “I remember watching her pull out of the driveway and knowing everything in my life was about to change.”
Woo and his colleagues at Kuku Studios, the Berkeley-based animation house they founded after leaving Pixar in 2016, had been stumped for a purpose pressing enough to make their school-age protagonists Stevie and Elliot seek out the mythical Sandman. The notion they might want him to forestall their parents separating gave emotional weight to a story Woo and Erik Benson – who jointly write and direct – had been struggling to make resonant.
“One of the alluring things about the dream world is that anything can happen, which makes it perfect for the medium of animation,” says Woo, who was born in Minnesota, moved to Hong Kong as a teenager, and went to film school in New York. “But that’s also its biggest challenge, because when anything can happen, nothing means anything.” The idea a figure from the protagonists’ dreams could solve a problem troubling them in their reality arrived during a lunch the director says was “fateful”.
“Suddenly we had a way to connect what was happening in the dream world to what was happening in the real world,” recalls Woo. “We were eating pizza that day and had run out of paper, so we started writing on the pizza box all the ideas that were pouring out of us.”
Free thinkers
While searching for the Sandman’s floating castle home, Stevie and Elliot encounter a town inhabited by breakfast foods, a menacing teddy bear and a hot dog that tries to eat them. The possibilities were endless for Woo, whose years at Pixar saw him work as a storyboard artist on titles including The Good Dinosaur, Wall-E and Ratatouille.
“Animation is such a versatile medium,” he says. “You can do subtle, nuanced performances that rival the best acting you see in live-action films, but you can also get cartoony performances and designs.”
At one point, Stevie and her younger brother are even rendered in stylised anime form. “It’s the full aesthetic departure, and that was the philosophy,” says the director. “How can we take advantage of everything the medium can offer?”
The film’s fantastical elements drew a warm reaction when Woo and his partners were pitching the project to backers. Other aspects, though, were less well received. “A lot of people wanted to make the dream movie and ignore the family dynamics,” he recalls. “But that didn’t feel right to us, so we politely declined and put it on the shelf.”
A commission from Netflix to make Go! Go! Cory Carson, a Daytime Emmy-winning show for preschoolers about anthropomorphised cars, paved the way for a multi-year production deal that would see In Your Dreams greenlit by then division heads Melissa Cobb and Gregg Taylor. “The most important thing was to get the movie made, with partners with the same creative vision we had,” explains Woo. “Melissa and Gregg latched onto the core story and loved how bold it was.”
With Sony Pictures Imageworks acting as its animation provider, the film was in a position to assemble its cast. They knew early on the leads’ family would be mixed race, and Simu Liu and Cristin Milioti were invited to voice parents Michael and Jennifer.
“I was looking for an actor of Chinese heritage because I wanted the ethnic representation to be authentic,” Woo says of Liu, star of Marvel’s Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings. “Simu sings an original song in the film” – ‘The Holding On And The Letting Go’ by composer Daniel Blake – “and it’s such a heartfelt performance.”
Milioti, a 2025 Primetime Emmy Award winner for her role in HBO Max’s The Penguin, had been a peer of the director’s at New York University, which lent circularity to her participation. “I didn’t know her at the time, but I did know of her,” says Woo, whose time at NYU saw him win a Student Academy Award for 2004 short Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher. “She’s an EGOT-level talent.”
UK comedian Omid Djalili voices the Sandman, while Craig Robinson was cast as cherished stuffed giraffe Baloney Tony.
In Your Dreams made its Netflix bow in mid-November after an awards-qualifying week in cinemas, and will now compete for voter attention at the Oscars and Baftas. Its director, however, feels his own dreams for his debut feature have already been realised.
“I’ve been getting so many messages from people telling me how much it’s meant to them,” says Woo, whose next feature will boast a “super funny” script by The Boss Baby screenwriter Michael McCullers. “The most rewarding part of being a filmmaker is if your work touches, moves and inspires.”
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