In Your Dreams opens on a family — a pigtailed girl in pajamas and her mom and dad — cooking breakfast to Outkast’s upbeat “Hey Ya!” You can almost smell the butter melting on their cast-iron skillet, a sizzling square of spongy cinnamon French toast perfuming the cozy scene. They’re the picture of a perfect family — as Stevie, the scene’s joyful protagonist, says in voice-over, “I mean, come on! We’re like one of those happy families you see at the beginning of a disaster movie” — until her little brother Elliot erupts with a pitchy scream in the next room, interrupting their idyll. A perfect family? Yeah, in your dreams. 

The debut feature film from Kuku Studios is an animated story of a family coming to terms with their faults and uncertainties by way of their wildest dreams and worst nightmares. Siblings Stevie (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) and Elliot (Elias Janssen) could not be less alike. Their room says it all: Whereas Stevie’s side is plastered with colorful Post-its reminding her to find her retainer and get straight A’s, Elliot’s is a sea of toys freckled by rogue slices of bologna. When Stevie begins to suspect that her parents — indie folk musician Dad (Simu Liu) and musician turned educator Mom (Cristin Milioti) — are heading for a separation, the brother-sister duo must meet somewhere in the middle of their approaches to life to repair their family.

Kuku Studios’ co-founder Alex Woo took inspiration from his childhood for his feature directorial debut. “At its heart, it’s a grounded, emotional story about two siblings finding their way through a world that doesn’t always make sense,” says Woo. “When I was 6 years old, on a cold Minnesota morning, I woke up to find my mom at the front door with her bags packed. She gently told my brother and me that she needed some time away to figure things out for our family. The alarm of that morning woke me up to the reality that life is far from perfect.” Just as Stevie and Elliot work together in In Your Dreams, Woo had his brother to lean on. “My brother and I hatched some harebrained schemes to save our family. None of them worked, but the bond we built on that journey helped us find a way forward in the middle of the unknown.”

Elliot (Elias Janssen), Mom (Cristin Milioti), and Stevie (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport)

Elliot and Stevie’s own “harebrained schemes” take them on a rollicking adventure. In a thrift store, Elliot discovers a dusty book about the legend of the Sandman, a shadowy figure who can make your dreams come true. When Elliot and Stevie chant a line from the book in tandem, they become nocturnally synced. With Elliot’s bed as their galloping steed, the siblings skyrocket into shared dreams, contending with moldy breakfast foods and otherworldly figures like Nightmara (Gia Carides), the queen of nightmares, in search of the Sandman. With the help of Baloney Tony, a stuffed giraffe voiced by Craig Robinson, they set out to fulfill their larger dream of keeping their family together.

Woo's filmmaking talents were recognized early on. A short film he made in college won a Student Academy Award — “It was very unexpected and just wonderful. My parents thought, ‘Oh, you’ve peaked,’ ” he recalls — which led to a job at Lucasfilm, and then a decade at Pixar during which he worked on Ratatouille and Wall-E, among other projects. In 2016, Woo left Pixar to start Kuku Studios with Tim Hahn and Stanley Moore, and their idea for In Your Dreams has been gestating ever since. In the meantime, Woo led almost every weekly eight-minute-long episode of the Netflix preschool series Go! Go! Cory Carson, which primed him to direct his first feature. He also pulled from his time working in Pixar’s story department. “Story really trains you to think like a director,” Woo says, “because you’re really thinking about character and what the narrative drive is. How does that sequence fit into the larger whole?” Woo enlisted a few longtime collaborators for In Your Dreams: veteran Pixar animator Erik Benson co-directed and co-wrote, with Gregg Taylor and Hahn producing. 

Assembling a trusted team allowed Woo to explore new territory with In Your Dreams, because that realm — where we go when we sleep — has rarely been explored in animation. “It’s been the white whale in animation. There are a couple of anime from Japan, like Paprika, but nothing in the American or Western animation space,” says Woo. “Dreams have always fascinated me. Where do they come from? What do they tell us about ourselves? Making this movie gave me the chance to explore those questions in the most fun and fantastical ways I could imagine.”

Elliot (Janssen) and Stevie (Hoang-Rappaport)

In the writing process, Woo looked to a few live-action takes on dreaming — including Inception — as well as ’80s adventure classics such as The Goonies and E.T. He also drew inspiration from the mysticism in Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 anime Spirited Away, and Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. While In Your Dreams catapults from Stevie and Elliot’s grassy Minnesota neighborhood to the limitless bounds of their dreamverse, Woo sought to anchor their trippy quest with real, grounding stakes.

When considering how to honestly and sensitively portray two kids coming to terms with the fracturing of their family, Woo consulted two child psychologists. “We showed the [psychologists] early versions of the movie,” Woo says, “and they were pleased at how we didn’t soften too many of the edges. That was their worry — that because it’s an animated family movie, we were going to gloss over the difficult conversations or emotions. We wanted to treat these characters as if this was really happening to them, and [portray] how they would respond.”

Woo was adamant that In Your Dreams should also include a healthy dose of skepticism. “It’s a bit countercultural because, especially in American and Western culture, there is this push for kids to pursue their dreams,” says Woo. “In many ways, that’s great. But there’s some nuance that’s missed: pursuing dreams at the expense of everything else can be unhealthy. Sometimes, if your dreams come true, it’s not exactly what you wanted. There’s a cost.” By the end of the film, Stevie realizes that she’d prefer messy reality over a fantasy dream realm. “There’s a cautionary tale aspect. But there’s an optimism at the end, which is about the power of your real relationships, the power of dreaming and working together, and how that can sometimes be better than your wildest dreams,” says Woo. “It’s a unique theme and message in the animation space today.” 

The heart of In Your Dreams is the durable bond between Stevie and Elliot, as inspired by Woo's relationship with his younger brother. The director quips, “My friend said, ‘Wow, this was a really, really circuitous way for you to tell your brother that you love him.’’ Stevie, Elliot, and their parents may not be the perfect, cheery family of the film’s opening scene, but they’re something better: a unit who can grow and learn to stick together as they encounter all the inevitable bumps in the road.

This feature originally appeared in Issue 21 of Tudum Magazine.