This article contains major character or plot details.
Stevie (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) and Elliot (Elias Janssen) just want their parents to stop fighting and stay together in In Your Dreams, the new animated film streaming on Netflix now. With the help of a magical book, they jet-set into their dreams to track down the Sandman (Omid Djalili), a mysterious figure who may be able to fix their family.
The bickering siblings find themselves united on their shared mission, until Stevie dives a little too deep into her mind. Once inside her dreams, she’s able to create the perfect union between her mom (Cristin Milioti) and dad (Simu Liu) where they’re no longer bumping heads over their stalled music career or whether Mom should take a new job out of state. And if Stevie stays in her dreams long enough, she can live in that world forever, cut off from real life.
Not if her family has anything to do with it.
As Stevie immerses herself deeper into her dreams, Elliot and her parents fight to bring her safely back to reality. “I made this movie with the belief that the best way through is with an open heart — that sometimes we need to let go of what we dream life should be and hold on to life as it actually is,” director Alex Woo says.
So what happens to Stevie, Elliot, and their parents in those final moments? And how does Elliot’s stuffed giraffe Baloney Tony (Craig Robinson) become an unlikely hero? Woo and the cast break it all down.
Yes! After falling into a deep slumber, Stevie is rushed to the hospital by her parents and Elliot, who spills the beans on their magical book. Elliot valiantly enters the dream world — fighting through his nightmares as he goes — and bursts into Stevie’s dream. There’s a ticking clock on his mission: if he can’t pull his sister out of her mind before the Sandman’s sand glass empties, she’ll be stuck there forever.
Stevie, meanwhile, is shocked to discover that — in her supposed dream world — her brother doesn’t exist. “Stevie really keeps trying to get to this perfect reality, and it just keeps fracturing in different ways,” Milioti shares. “I think one of the aspects that I find very moving is that even within the dreams, there’s always something missing or there's always something slightly wrong.”
As Stevie grapples with the loss of her once pesky sibling, she spots Baloney Tony. A flashback reveals that Stevie and Elliot won the stuffed animal together at Polly’s Pizzeria, their favorite childhood restaurant. That moment, Woo recalls, was a particularly tough one to crack.
“We really struggled with how we were going to get Stevie to realize how important Elliot was to her, and we tried all sorts of different things. We tried to do flashbacks to earlier moments in the film to showcase and remind her when they worked together that they were able to succeed, but it didn’t quite work.”
Instead, they find themselves gravitating back to Polly’s. “We liked the idea that one of the reasons Elliot is so fond of Baloney Tony is because it is something that he shared with Stevie from when they were very young,” Woo says.
Feeling the full weight of love for her brother and desperate to return to reality, Stevie attempts to break out of her dream but discovers she’s stuck. Thankfully, Elliot pulls her out and the duo race to stop the sand glass. They’re deterred by the Sandman’s very adorable henchman, a collection of tiny glowing creatures called Sandlings.
As the Sandlings pile on top of Elliot and Stevie, Mom and Dad appear on the scene. They’ve figured out how to get inside the Sandman’s lair and, working together, hold the gateway open just as the siblings evade the Sandlings. Safe from the dream world, the whole family embraces. As producer Gregg Taylor puts it to Tudum, “Life isn’t perfect. There comes a moment when we realize we need to see life as it is, rather than what we wish it could be.”
Cristin Milioti, Simu Liu, Craig Robinson, and Alex Woo
We don’t know for sure. In the final moments of the film, we learn that their mom has decided to take a job at an out-of-town university, and their dad is going to branch out with a new band. The whole family is moving together, though, and we get some insight from Stevie’s voice-over on where her parents stand. “They’re still figuring things out,” she explains. “And that’s OK.”
As the family head off to their new chapter, Stevie adds, “It turns out my dreams were trying to tell me something. Life isn’t perfect and neither are we. But no matter how it changes, we’ll always have each other.”
Woo recalls the creative team toying with different versions of that ending, trying a clear-cut separation between the parents (which felt too tragic) and a reconciliation (too contrived). In the end, they settled on a gray area. One of the film’s last shots shows the parents struggling to lift a big box into the moving van, with one going left and the other going right.
“You can tell they’re just not quite in sync yet, but they’re trying,” Woo says. “I wanted to leave it open-ended because the truth is it doesn’t really matter where they end up because they're always going to love each other.”
Tackling the delicate subject of family strife with respect and authenticity was crucial to Woo. The creative team consulted two child psychologists, both of whom specialize in helping kids deal with family trauma or uncertainty, for feedback. To Woo’s surprise, the psychologists didn’t come back with many notes and reinforced that the film offered a realistic depiction of how children might handle their parents’ potential separation. The director recalls being told that it’s “very realistic and very common, especially for teenage girls and preteen girls” to want to fix the situation, even if it’s not their problem to solve.
The whole family stepping in to help Stevie — and subsequently working together to stop the sand glass — served as an important final bow to the film’s message. “Only when they come together as a family can they persevere and overcome the obstacles that an imperfect life and an imperfect world throws their way,” Woo says.
For Liu, In Your Dreams also offers a chance to open up an important dialogue between kids and their parents.
“My hope for this movie is that families can watch it, and it becomes a starting point for a conversation of, ‘Hey, Mommy and Daddy fight sometimes. We don’t always see eye to eye on everything, and that's totally OK. That’s natural. It doesn’t mean we love each other any less.’ ”
And if things do change in the relationship? “There’s still so much love that can be had,” Liu says.
In Your Dreams is streaming on Netflix now.
