“So dreams are where you can break the rules, but the story still has to feel true.” That’s how director Alex Woo sums up the delicate balance at the heart of Netflix’s In Your Dreams.
The new animated feature, set to stream on Netflix in November, invites audiences to follow Stevie and her brother Elliot as they dive into the imaginative world of their own dreams and encounter scary nightmares, all while trying to reach the Sandman, who can grant them their ultimate wish to keep their parents from divorcing.
Drawing on his own Minnesota childhood home for the film’s setting, In Your Dreams follows siblings Stevie (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) and Elliot (Elias Janssen) as they journey into the vibrant, unpredictable world of dreams to find The Sandman, the mysterious figure who holds the power to grant their wish of saving their parents’ – mom (Cristin Milioti) and dad (Simu Liu) – marriage.
“That house, the layout of the house, is almost exactly the way of the house that I grew up in,” Woo shared. The dreamy pond chase scene? Inspired by a pond near his childhood neighborhood among Minnesota’s famous 10,000 lakes, so much of the house in the film is influenced by Woo’s home that the opening scene is exactly like his childhood kitchen.
“I found a photo recently,” Woo recalled. “I was back home going through some photo albums, and I saw a picture of my mom, dad, me, and my brother. The kitchen looked exactly like the kitchen when I was about five years old. It was eerie because I hadn’t even referenced that photo. I was just describing the kitchen to our production designer, and he created the design based on my sense memory. Even the door was so specific.”
At the heart of the story is a very personal inspiration for Woo. “My mom sort of went away for a little bit, and obviously, you know, it was hard for me and my brother,” he shared. “But yeah, we sort of banded together and tried all these sort of harebrained schemes to get our parents back together. That was sort of the big inspiration for the scope of the film.”
Those real-life family experiences fuel the emotional weight beneath the film’s whimsical dream world. It was that inspiration that helped shape In Your Dreams into more than just a visually imaginative adventure. It’s a film that can resonate with children who may be going through the same confusion and uncertainty when their parents are going through a separation.
To ensure Stevie and Elliot’s emotional journey rang true in a quest as fantastical as finding the Sandman in the world of dreams, Woo grounded the story in research. “We spoke to a lot of child psychologists,” he said. We asked them everything from how kids cope when their parents are separating, what they wish for, and whether wanting to keep their parents together is believable.”
According to Woo, every single kid in that situation, where the parents are going through a divorce, just wants their parents to stay together. As such, it validated the story they were creating because it meant Stevie’s goal wasn’t just believable. It was deeply rooted.
On the dream side, Woo and his team couldn’t exactly visit a dream world, so they turned inward. “We kept dream journals for everyone on the crew,” he explained. People submitted their most potent and recurring dreams and nightmares.
“We built a long list from those personal experiences and figured out which ones could fit into the structure of the story,” he said. “It was a lot of self-reflection and observation, which made even the wildest dreamscapes feel grounded in something real.”
During the presentation, we watched over 30 minutes of footage, enough to get swept up in Stevie and Elliot’s push-and-pull sibling dynamic and feel the weight of their quest pulling them deeper into the dream world. As the eldest, Stevie carries the responsibility of holding the family together. She once held the spotlight, but Elliot’s arrival shifted the attention. The quintessential younger sibling, Elliot’s charm and curiosity often place him at the center, sometimes clashing with Stevie’s perfectionist and protective nature.
At home, Stevie and Elliot live in a picture-perfect Minnesota suburb with their parents, who put their musical dreams on hold to provide a stable life for their kids. When Mom drives to Duluth for a teaching job interview, the family must confront the reality of their situation. Providing a better home and education for the children will eventually require leaving the suburbs, taking new jobs, and setting aside their musical aspirations. This doesn’t sit well with Dad, who believes they are on the verge of a breakthrough.
Stevie, who overhears the situation, feels powerless to do anything about it. Even her ability to cook a family breakfast cannot ease the tension or fix the problems looming over their household. So the two turn to a book about the legend of the Sandman, the giver of dreams, in hopes that he will grant them their ultimate dream of a perfect family.
Along their journey across dreams and nightmares, they meet Baloney Tony (Craig Robinson), one of Elliot’s stuffed giraffes, who can toss around deli meat. Tony has quite a history with Stevie, one that left him stuck behind the fridge. Now, if he wants to stay free, he agrees to help Stevie and Elliot on their quest to find the Sandman.
As their journey unfolds, Stevie, Elliot, and Baloney Tony explore more of the dream world, discovering that the Cthulhu-inspired, tendriled Nightmara uses her nightmares as barriers to keep them from reaching The Sandman. Often, these nightmares are tied to the dreams they experience.
For example, Breakfast Town can transform into a stale, moldy place filled with zombie-like breakfast staples that hang Stevie, Eilllot, and Baloney Tony over a toaster. A trip to a pizza parlor can begin as a fun-filled dream with ball pits and spinning rides, only to take a hellish turn that jolts them awake. Other times, the nightmares are simpler but just as unsettling, like dreaming of being naked in a department store.
To capture the authenticity of these dreams and a child’s desire to keep the parents who have had a falling out, Woo relies on insights from child psychologists. The idea that most children want their parents to stay together served as the emotional foundation for Stevie and Elliot.
Those dream journals that Woo asked the crew to keep were personal dreams that inspired the film’s fantasy world. As such, it made sure that the surreal moments were grounded in genuine emotional experiences and psychological truths.
To help add differentiating layers to these dream worlds, Woo had In Your Dreams utilize anime influences and other stylistic choices to impact the film’s visuals. “It was obvious to try and take advantage of the medium of animation,” Woo said. “It’s about the world of dreams, and so many possibilities in a world of dreams.”
Woo said he was inspired by anime as a kid, so much so that he wanted to be an anime character himself. “I wanted to find some way to put that sort of esthetic into the film, and being in a world of dreams gave us that license to do it,” he said.
In essence, exploring these different animation styles within the dream sequences gave the artists the creative freedom to reflect the siblings’ moods and the unpredictable logic of their world. It also provided audiences with a visual cue to distinguish reality from dreams. For example, a dream that otherwise resembled real life, like Stevie and Elliot’s nightmare of being naked in a department store, would have surreal touches such as censored blurs to help remind audiences that the scene is taking place in the dreamscape.
Production designer Steve Pilchner explained how color and lighting were carefully calibrated to reflect the siblings’ emotions and the shifting logic of the dream world. Calm, restful moments in Stevie and Elliot’s bedroom, for instance, are bathed in cool, blue-tinted light. At the same time, joyful dream sequences like Breakfast Town burst with bright, sunny colors.
As the dreams grow tense or threatening, the palette gradually desaturates, cools, and darkens, signaling danger or obstacles in their quest for the Sandman. “Color is life, so if you drain that out, you’re draining the life out of something,” Pilchner said, noting that lighting then works in tandem with color to underscore these emotional shifts. These visual cues guide the audience seamlessly between moods and between the familiar reality of the children’s world and the unpredictable terrain of their dreams.
Since the real world is the catalyst for the dream world, everything Stevie and Elliot encounter in reality often reappears in their dreams in reimagined form. Still, Pilcher and his team worked within specific parameters to ensure consistency, so that even as the dreams grew vivid and stretched logic, they always traced back to the characters’ lived experiences.
“If you’re in a dream, and it’s very colorful, and it’s a very happy dream, and it’s very sunny, like breakfast town,” Pilcher added. “But then it starts to change and shift, because you’ve been in it a long time and you need to wake up. Well, if you’re not going to wake up, you don’t want to wake up, you’re trying to find the Sandman.”
This is where the nightmares serve as a narrative obstacle for Stevie and Elliot. “So it starts to change color and tone. The characters start to change. The color changes and drops down. It might get a less colorful, more desaturated. It also starts to get colder. Then it starts to go even darker, and then it starts to get even scarier,” Pilcher said. “Then something threatening comes in, and then that’s it. It completely changes tonality and emotionally.”
“It’s a very primitive thing,” Pilcher said about the color contrasts and the emotion it evokes. “You take anybody and put them in a daylight, sunny beach setting with Hawaiian water, and then take that same person to a rainforest or jungle at night with tigers and nothing, and drop them there. They’re not going to go in there because it’s unknown, it’s darkness, it’s primal, it’s dangerous.”
Using color as temperature to convey feeling also helps set the tone, specifically with a color like blue, which can feel cold. But even draining that blue to make the color grey can heighten the tension. “Even more poignant is that if you drain the blue out of that cold color, it becomes gray. It’s almost more deathly, even paler, Pilcher said. “It’s like you’re draining the life out of something. That’s a signal that something not great is coming, or something’s trying to stop you from enjoying that dream.”
As production went on, the film also underwent an evolution. “As we went into production and moved forward, new rules would emerge to help streamline things,” Lavender said. She points to examples like Breakfast Town, where the characters remain breakfast foods but the town itself was crafted from tactile, handmade elements, or the sandcastle sequence, where glowing sandbirds and sound links served as light sources. For Lavender, these evolving details kept the dreamscapes whimsical yet cohesive.
Sand was also a challenge for Lavender, who says the animation team had to develop new tools to capture the movement and behavior of the sand, as well as effects-heavy characters like the Sandman and Nightmara. “Heavy characters that need to be driven by animation, those were the real ones that kind of were the biggest challenges for us, and making sure that we could go all the way through from animation and control those characters and give effects and the upstream departments the information they needed to, you know, form the rest of it,” she said.
Oftentimes, films of this size and scope require various departments to work independently and collaborate. “On a film like this, you’re constantly juggling departments, effects, and creative choices,” Pilcher said. “There’s a lot of back-and-forth. Sometimes, we challenge a decision, go back, revisit it, and finally agree. Even though everyone’s busy with their own work, the camaraderie and collaboration make it all come together.”
That camaraderie was challenged when the COVID-19 pandemic hit just as production started in January 2020. “I spent 18 months [in Hong Kong] working on the film remotely,” Woo said. “The time difference is 15 hours ahead, so I would work from midnight to eight in the morning, then do my own work afterward, sleep during the day, and wake up to start again. I did that for a year and a half. It was incredibly challenging, but it had nothing to do with the film. It was just the circumstances we were in.”
While the time difference did present a challenge for the production, Hahn saw it as an opportunity. “You get to really expand who you’re working with in this kind of remote way,” he said.
Some of the inspiration behind these characters, like Sandman and Nightmara, came from natural disasters like tornadoes and other storms. They were looking at how they behaved, the speed of their movements, and what happens if they hit bodies of water.
Of course, for these dreams to look and feel real, the color and lighting had to be carefully considered. Not only do they establish the emotional stakes within the dreams, but they also heighten the tension in the nightmares. That transition from the bright and sweet look of Breakfast Town to a scary and slightly disgusting, moldy world uses color and subject matter from the real world to inform the dream’s look.
“Anything that’s a dark sequence is always challenging because you don’t want to be afraid of going dark, but the most important thing is the storytelling,” Lavender said. “We watch the shots in the theater and then, at the final color grade, if it’s a very important story moment and feels too dark, we’ll adjust it, up the brightness a little bit, so that you can read everything you need to understand those story points.”
So the team had to adjust brightness and contrast during color grading to ensure that the mood was conveyed without losing essential story details. By giving the film rich textures and nuanced lighting, viewers gain a more profound sense of Stevie and Elliot’s emotional state. This thoughtful approach to visual design guides the audience seamlessly through the emotional and narrative transitions between reality and dream.
“I feel like it’s rich in texture, and there’s a lot of stuff everywhere,” Lavender said. “We try to really break out of that classic CG, and even though it’s caricatured, there’s a lot of depth and detail and history in the characters and all the environments. We were cautious with the lighting, adding cores to lights, specks, diffuses, so that even if you don’t notice everything right away, it immerses you and creates this softness.”
Scope was also a challenge for Woo as building new sets for different dreams and then those dreams had to turn into nightmares can get pricey. “You basically had to do two versions of every single character in every single dream world,” Woo said. “So the scope of the film was really challenging.
The visual atmosphere isn’t just built on what we see. The score and sound design deepen the emotional dreamscape and the real world. So Woo brought in veteran composer John Debney, whose work spans film, television, and even video games, to provide the music.
Making Stevie and Elliot’s parents musicians gave Debney and the team a unique foundation to work from. As director Alex Woo explains, music wasn’t just background. It was a narrative thread. The parents’ musical ambitions mirror the tension between dreams and reality that Stevie and Elliot navigate in the dream world, and specific sequences lean heavily on these original songs to heighten emotional stakes.
“Music is so powerful emotionally, and it was such an advantage to have the family and the parents specifically be musicians because they would weave music into the sequences in a very organic way,” Woo said. “There’s a sequence where Dad’s song from the beginning of the film is finally completed and played in full near the end of the second act. It’s one of the most emotional scenes in the movie, and it wouldn’t have worked without that song.”
Since the film has a strong musical foundation, it also features an eclectic selection of songs. From Outkast’s “Hey Ya” to open the film, Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams,” Eric Carmen’s “Hungry Eyes” to introduce Baloney Tony, and even a Prince name drop, these songs were handpicked by music supervisor and KCRW DJ Chris Douridas. Together with Netflix, “they really helped us find great songs that work seamlessly with the story,” Hahn said.
While music alone is enough to delight and bridge that generational gap, it wouldn’t be too hard to be captivated by a film that explores the imagination of dreams and the fear of nightmares.
What gives In Your Dreams deeper resonance is how these fantastical elements are anchored in real-world experience. That grounding extends to the characters themselves. So even though, Stevie and Elliot are of a mixed-Asian family, but their identity is not the story’s central point of conflict.
As an Asian American director, Woo wanted to take In Your Dreams to the next step in terms of representation. “It’s important to be able to see characters that look like me and reflect sort of my heritage on screen, and I think a lot of filmmakers ahead of me have done a great job of putting characters like me and like you on screen,” he said. “I think a lot of those films, they were really focused on characters where that was the major part of their identity, and so they were really wrestling with, what does it mean to be Asian in America or a minority in a community or in a culture.”
So instead of creating a “for us by us” kind of film, Woo wanted to do with In Your Dreams to break free of certain limitations by featuring characters from this kind of heritage, but not have it be their primary identity, and not the problem that they’re dealing with. “The problem that they’re dealing with is something universally relatable that any sort of kid or any family would experience regardless of what their ethnic heritage is,” Woo said. “So that was sort of my attempt to try and take representation to the next level.”
Hahn adds that Stevie’s fixation on trying to fix something that may not be her responsibility, and her discovery that chasing perfection can be the enemy of good, are themes that can resonate with audiences universally. Still, some subtle acknowledgments of Stevie and Elliot being hapa and raised in a household with an Asian father.
Hahn points out the subtle production design details that enrich the story while also spotlighting Stevie and Elliot’s Asian American identity. “When you rewatch the film, you’ll notice little, tiny production design details that we don’t emphasize, like they take their shoes off at the front of the house. There’s a rack for shoes,” he said. “There’s some Chinese art on the wall that’s actually taken from paintings that Alex, his own grandfather, painted. And there’s a lucky cat that Stevie taps in the opening sequence.”
“Our guiding principle was that everything in the dream world had to be rooted in reality,” Woo says. “Rarely do my dreams come out of nowhere — usually they’re inspired by something from the day. We wanted Stevie and Elliot’s experiences to have that same connection. Almost every dream in the film is set up somewhere in the real world, so there’s always that link between what’s imagined and what’s lived.”
In Your Dreams hits Netflix on November 14, 2025.
