In Your Dreams review – Netflix dreams up a powerful Pixar adventure | Animation in the movie

HeyOnce upon a time, Pixar was enjoying the kind of winning streak that most companies could only dream of. Not only has the studio maintained a strong product line that appeals to critics and audiences, but it has also managed to change our concept of what animation can accomplish as an art form. Radically expansive visuals were matched with surprising, punchy ideas, conjuring the kind of magic that had been largely absent from Disney’s output of previous years.

While many blamed the ensuing fade-out on Covid, in fact it had already begun before then. Like the rest of the industry, the company has become overly reliant on sequels, with the four years leading up to 2020 seeing one original to four follow-ups and with cinemas closed, its most recent offering Onward was mediocre enough to suggest that even superfans should be worried about the future. It’s been a constant letdown ever since, and it’s the lowest point Elio has reached this year, a hot mess that had the lowest opening ever for a Pixar film (the only bright spot in Inside Out 2 left the upcoming slate looking predictably heavy).

It’s hard not to see Netflix’s pre-Thanksgiving adventure In Your Dreams as an attempt to bridge the gap both visually and thematically, as the film sticks closely to Pixar’s playbook. It’s not up to their one-off standards, but it’s more engaging than your average streaming anime and a better spectacle than what Netflix gave us last year, the noticeably ugly Spellbound that tried and failed miserably to give us a Disney princess knockoff.

In Your Dreams is more reminiscent of Inside Out with shades of Coco; A quest story set in a world close to our own, in this case the world of dreams. Like Spellbound, it’s also a story of kids trying to deal with parents whose marriage is on the rocks, a conversation that’s not at all relevant or welcome to introduce and help with. Stevie is a girl who dreams of better days, when the family dynamic worked as it should (“like one of those happy families you see at the beginning of a disaster movie”), but even her consciousness knows something is wrong, turning her dreams into nightmares and sending her back to the less idyllic real world. A rather complicated set of circumstances leads her and her younger brother Elliot to a book about a Sandman who can allegedly turn dreams into reality and with their mother threatening to leave the family home for a new job, the pair are thrust into a journey inside their own minds.

The aesthetic of In Your Dreams, particularly that of the human characters, is so inescapably Pixar-coded that it would feel ashamed were it not the brainchild of Alex Woo, a writer-director who was once a story artist on several of its landmark titles, including Ratatouille and Wall-E. This is still very much Netflix’s knock-off of that but it’s vastly more compelling than many of their lower-level efforts. Woo and co-writer Erik Benson, a former Pixar staffer, do a good enough job of trying to bring the same style to the screenplay with them — life lessons delivered without a heavy hand woven into a dynamic jumpstart — and while their emotional brand never quite hits, there are noteworthy notes here.

As in Inside Out, where we learned that sadness must exist alongside happiness, here we are told that nightmares can help strengthen us in the same way that dreams can lead to inspiration. It’s not exactly innovative but it has more texture to it than just a simple ‘family is important’ message and, combined with the relatively rare decision to prioritize the brother-sister relationship, it helps set this apart a bit from the pack. What they can’t quite convey is the film’s intelligence, where the film fails when it tries to entertain us rather than educate us. The inevitable sidekick, this time a stuffed animal sprung to life with the voice of Craig Robinson, is largely unfunny while the various shots of dream worlds lack anything truly silly enough to make us smile.

However, Woo is a talent that Netflix would be wise to keep in their animation stable and with a stronger script and less derivative concept (there are also notes of Coraline here), one can imagine something better in his future. In a runtime that almost pushes it into an extended loop more than a movie (it’s advertised as 90 but ends at just under 80), this is too slight and too breezy to leave much of an impression, like a dream you’ll forget as soon as you open your eyes.