‘In Your Dreams’ is a dream come true for director Alex Woo

“When I left (Pixar), obviously it was very scary,” Woo tells JoySauce. “It was a mixture of excitement and anxiety, and also a lot of sadness. I loved so many of my friends at Pixar. I grew up there; I learned my craft there; I honed my craft there. So there were mixed emotions, but I knew I was ready for something new. I wasn't feeling as creatively inspired.” Standing on the precipice of a major life change is naturally frightening. Each of us endures that sensation more than once in our lives. Woo felt it as an adult when he resigned from Pixar to start Kuku. Siblings Stevie (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) and Elliot (Elias Janssen), In Your Dreams’ dual protagonists, feel it as children on the sidelines as their mom (Cristin Milioti) and dad (Simu Liu) quarrel with one another right up to the edge of separation.

It’s a special kind of hell, watching your parents’ relationship fracture and knowing you’re powerless to seal the cracks. In Your Dreams gifts Stevie and Elliot with precisely that power, though, found in a mysterious dusty tome that grants them passage to literal dreamland, where they seek, find, and beseech The Sandman (Omid Djalili) to save their parents’ marriage. As heroes’ journeys go, theirs is surprisingly brisk. The kids have their audience with The Sandman before the film’s third act. But there’s a critical disclaimer to his powers, and while saying more than that would mean saying too much, the moral of the story is that not all dreams should actually come true.

Woo’s apprehensions are tied to his career, while Stevie and Elliott’s instead derive from the most personal place possible for a child, but they’re the common thread that joins Woo’s decision to strike out on his own with the threat of mom and dad splitting. If In Your Dreams isn’t explicitly about the disquiet Woo felt in 2016, that disquiet nonetheless feels integral to the film’s “stuff”—a movie about facing turning points in life that is itself the product of a turning point in life. And just as Stevie tacks high expectations to her meeting with The Sandman, Woo likewise had ambitions for Kuku in its fledgling years that were outsized.

“I thought we were going to come out the gate,” Woo says, “and it would be a rocket launch into the sky. That was definitely not the case. It was very humbling.” He cites the adage that people overestimate what they can do in a day, and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. Kuku did no business (according to Woo) in its first year, but in that year, Woo and his co-founders—fellow Pixar grads Stanley Moore and Tim Hahn—figured out who they wanted to be as artists and as a studio. “That period of time, of challenge, really honed our character as a company,” Woo explains. “That's what led to where we are now. I don't think, in my wildest imaginations, I would've thought that within the first 10 years of our studio, we could make a movie at this scale, that was executed without compromise and had this much artistic integrity. My whole team and I, we're so thrilled and we feel so lucky.”

Kuku’s slow rise, which includes the 2020-21 animated sitcom Go! Go! Cory Carson, contrasts with Pixar’s present day middling fortunes: in the last five years, the studio’s released among the worst-received and lowest-grossing movies in its history. And while the COVID-19 pandemic is an easily attributable cause for the financial dip, floundering inventiveness is the greater culprit.

So Woo, it seems, left at just around the right time, not because Pixar was in a rut—in 2016, the studio was still riding high off of Inside Out’s massive $858 million worldwide gross, with Finding Dory’s cool $1 billion box office just around the corner—but because Netflix happened to be carving out a foothold for itself in animation at the same time. “Seeing what Netflix was doing with originals and with streaming got me very excited,” Woo admits. “I just thought there was a tremendous amount of change that was going to happen in the industry, and I thought there was going to be, with that change, a lot of opportunity.”

Time has proven him right: right now, KPop Demon Hunters’ monstrous impact on pop culture is the best proof possible of Netflix’s presence in animation. In Your Dreams is a comparatively niche production, smaller in scale and laser-focused on a very specific experience. But it’s striking that for their first feature-length project, Woo, Moore (who helped develop the movie’s plot, concept, and characters) and Hahn (who produced) came up with a narrative about hopes and dreams, as if an unconscious product of the tensions that weighed on Woo and his colleagues post-Pixar. In Your Dreams is about what happens when a dream is realized. The question it poses isn’t, “What if Stevie fails?” But “What if Stevie succeeds?” And it applies to Woo, as well.

What if Kuku makes it as an independent studio? What if not? Will the choice to leave Pixar be validated no matter the outcome? It’s rare for directors to make movies under the conditions Woo lays out: uncompromisingly, with their creative vision intact. Maybe that’s the dream. And if that’s the case, then In Your Dreams may be the exception to its own moral.