By Kayla DeKraker
For director Alexander Woo, his new movie IN YOUR DREAMS allowed him to explore ideas that other animated movies hadn’t tackled yet.
“I’ve always been fascinated by dreams because they’re such a universal human experience, and we still don’t know why we dream,” he told Movieguide®’s Kaelii Williams. “So that makes great material for fiction and mythology and storytelling. I hadn’t really seen dreams explored in a really meaningful way in feature animation.”
“In live action, you have INCEPTION obviously, which is like one of the greatest dream movies ever made, but then in animation, it hasn’t really been explored yet. So I was really excited to tell a story that took place in that world, because you can kind of do anything. It’s the perfect medium for an animation. You could be so spectacular.”
The movie follows “A sister and brother journey into the wildly absurd landscape of their own dreams to ask the wish-granting Sandman for the perfect family,” Netflix’s synopsis reads.
Woo took inspiration from his own childhood experience for the movie’s plot.
“For the personal story, it was really inspired by my own family. When I was a kid, my parents nearly split up,” he revealed in his conversation with Movieguide®. “It was really tough for me and my brother. We tried our best to be like, you know, save our family and keep them together. This movie is very much an exploration of and reconciliation with the idea that families aren’t perfect, parents aren’t perfect, people aren’t perfect, but that’s okay.”
He added, “Life is about dealing with that imperfection, getting through the messiness together with the people that you love. That was a really meaningful sort of understanding and learning that I had to growing up.”
Woo believes the story is “a great piece of wisdom to pass on to other children and other audiences.”
“There’s so much pressure on people and especially kids to be perfect…to make their dreams come true,” he said. “And I think that there’s some amount that’s healthy, but there’s a dark side to it, because you can get lost in that pursuit of perfection. You can get lost in the pursuit of your dreams. You can neglect everything around you.”
His ultimate goal of IN YOUR DREAMS is for the movie to bring families together: “I think what families do best is they come together in your darkest moments and they help you get through that messiness and that imperfection. A big reason why I wanted to tell the story is just to sort of flip the charge on dreams and nightmares.”
The cast stars Jolie Hoang-Rappaport, Elias Janssen, Craig Robinson, Simu Liu, Cristin Milioti, Omid Djalili, Gia Carides, SungWon Cho and Zachary Noah Piser.
“Dad represents a lot of us,” Simu Liu said of his character. “If I give up on my dreams, what example am I setting for my kids? [Dad] could do to be a little more realistic.”
Movieguide® gave IN YOUR DREAMS a -1 content score, praising its “Very strong moral” worldview.
Movieguide®’s review says that the movie “has a wonderful, positive, theologically sound ending that touches your mind and heart. However, although the story starts off very funny, it transitions to being very scary, with the characters having to go through nightmares.”
“The movie relies too much on magical thinking, which is refuted in the end,” the review continues. “Thus, IN YOUR DREAMS eventually resolves these problems in a very uplifting, heartfelt and wonderful way. However, the movie’s scary content and magical thinking are too strong. So, MOVEGUIDE® urges caution for younger children.”
IN YOUR DREAMS debuted on Netflix on earlier this month.
Questions or comments? Please write to us here.
– Content: +1Share:
– Content: +1