How A Former Pixar Animator Made Netflix’s Most Underrated New Fantasy Adventure
Ten years ago, Alex Woo left Pixar to found his own animation studio. Now, he’s finally directed his first movie.
Alex Woo began working at Pixar in 2005 and quickly accumulated quite the resume: he worked as a story artist on some of the animation studio’s greatest hits, including Ratatouille, WALL-E, The Good Dinosaur, and The Incredibles 2. But by 2016, he was looking to carve his own path. He left Pixar to found Kuku Studios that year, an independent animation studio that aimed to make audiences "cry tears of laughter and tears of pathos.” And nearly nine years later, Woo succeeded with his first directorial feature, In Your Dreams.
In Your Dreams follows siblings Stevie and Elliot who discover a mysterious book called The Legend of the Sandman. The book gives them the ability to “Lucid Dream,” which allows them to control aspects of the dream and navigate wildly imaginative dream worlds. When Stevie and Elliot discover that their parents may be on the verge of splitting up, they embark on a quest in the dream world to find the Sandman, so he can grant their wishes of keeping their family together.
It’s an ambitious and near-impossible premise: making a movie in which only one’s imagination is the limit. But it was the “white whale” that Woo and his tiny team of three dreamed of overcoming.
“Every studio I know has had a dream movie in development at some point, and yet none of them ever made it to the finish line,” Woo tells Inverse. “The challenge is built into the premise: what makes a dream movie so alluring—the fact that anything can happen—is also what makes it so difficult. When anything can happen, nothing matters. In other words, it’s hard to create stakes in a world without rules. But somehow, our team cracked it.”
Woo’s way in was a classic Pixar technique: find the emotional core. When Woo was young, his parents also nearly split up, an experience that was “terrifying for me and my brother,” Woo recalls.
“I remember watching my mom drive away one day and feeling like the only thing I wanted in the world was to find a way to save my family. My parents eventually found their way back to each other — though not without challenges — and I wanted to make a film that explored the idea that families aren’t perfect, but that embracing that imperfection and navigating life’s messiness with the people you love is what makes it meaningful.”
It’s an arc that feels straight out of a Pixar movie, and is perhaps one of the essential lessons that Woo took from Pixar, he says. But for him, the most important thing he learned from Pixar “story is king.”
“Every decision a director makes should serve the story,” Woo says.
In Your Dreams takes audiences on an adventure in the dream world.
That includes balancing the varying tones of In Your Dreams, which bounced between comedic — especially in the form of the siblings’ stuffed-animal sidekick, Baloney Tony (Craig Robinson) — and the straight up scary, mostly embodied by the terrifying Nightmara (Gia Carides). “Finding the right tone—especially the balance between scary and safe—was one of the biggest challenges of the film,” Woo says. “I loved being scared by movies as a kid because it felt like a controlled way to experience huge emotions. But there was always a threshold where it became too much. I kept that kid version of me in mind while making this film, and it helped guide what felt appropriate for younger audiences.”
But being aware of his audience didn’t stop Woo and his team from exploring every imaginative corner of the dream world. For the dream world, especially the Sandcastle, he took inspiration from MC Escher paintings (“his work defies the laws of physics”), while his Sandman drew from all previous iterations of the folklorish figure — from “Neil Gaiman’s moody, brooding interpretation; Bill Joyce’s silent, impish version from The Guardians of Childhood; and the oldest roots of the character in Scandinavian folklore.” The result is an animated film that is both surreal and dreamlike, but also familiar and fun (who hasn’t dreamed about Breakfast Town?). And critics have been kind to the movie too, praising its “imaginative flourishes.”
Since In Your Dreams’ release on Netflix, Woo has been flattered by the positive response. “I’ve received hundreds of DMs and emails from people who’ve seen it and loved it. That’s the most rewarding part of being a filmmaker.”
