5 Things We Learned About Netflix's In Your Dreams

Netflix has been having one heck of a year in the animation department, with the long-awaited release of living legend Genndy Tartakovsky's 2D adult animated feature "Fixed" and the cultural sensation "KPop Demon Hunters" becoming the most-watched Netflix Original Film ever. Now, they're set to release the wholly original animated feature "In Your Dreams," and it looks like another hit in the making. The film whisks us away with Stevie (voiced by Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) and her little brother Elliot (Elias Janssen), who tumble headfirst into a wild dreamscape on a mission to track down the ever-elusive Sandman — a mysterious figure who claims he can make their dreams come true ... if they can find him. Their journey takes them through all kinds of bizarre and whimsical landscapes pulled straight from the wacky corners of imagination (and the slightly creepier corners of nightmares).

Tagging along for the ride is Elliot's wisecracking, no-nonsense stuffed giraffe, Baloney Tony (voiced by Craig Robinson), who might just steal the whole show. While the first teaser trailer dropped in sync with this year's Annecy International Animation Film Festival, I was given a sneak peek at extended scenes during a private Netflix event. Director Alex Woo, making his feature debut, shared his jaw-dropping journey from working with animation giants to launching his own film with Kuku Studios. He and producer Tim Hahn gave /Film an inside look at how the film came together, and gave us plenty of reasons to be excited for the film's debut in November 2025.

They always say to write what you know, and for Alex Woo, "In Your Dreams" comes from his own experiences as a kid. "When I was like maybe six or seven years old, my mom sort of went away for a little bit, and obviously it was hard for me and my brother," he tells us. "We sort of banded together and we tried all these sort of hare-brained schemes to try and get our parents to get back together, and that was sort of the big inspiration for this film." Woo also mentioned being inspired by films like "The Parent Trap" when concocting these schemes, and luckily, his parents are still together today and have been married for 50 years.

But perhaps the greatest honor is that the film's beloved, disgusting stuffie sidekick, Baloney Tony, was also inspired by Woo's childhood. "My brother used to have this stuffed animal that had this really gross stain on the back," says Woo. "We called him butthole bear, 'cause you can imagine where the stain was placed." Woo wanted to embrace the childhood tradition of stuffed animals that we've all loved to death, and knew the movie needed one of those characters to help guide Stevie and Elliot on their journey. "Baloney Tony is really supposed to be the sort of subconscious of Elliot, sort of his id," Woo explained. As someone who spent my formative years workshopping my personality by embodying my Barbies with my different thoughts and feelings ... I get it.

Animated films famously take a long time to complete, and "In Your Dreams" is no different. Alex Woo, Stanley Moore, and Tim Hahn founded Kuku Studios in 2016 and spent their first year brainstorming the types of animated projects they wanted to make. One of the ideas that came from that was what would become "In Your Dreams." According to Woo, "We pitched it around town and nobody bought it, so we put it on the shelf, and then we made our first show, which is 'Go! Go! Cory Carson,' and that took like two or three years." But around 2020, Netflix started investing heavily in original programming and asked if the folks at Kuku Studios had any other ideas. They pulled "In Your Dreams" down off the shelf, pitched the movie, and the streaming juggernaut greenlit the project. Production began about two months before the start of the COVID-19 production, and was truly in the thick of it from the spring of 2020 through the end of 2024. It just goes to show that a great idea will truly never go unmade; it just might have to wait for the right time.

And Netflix loved the project exactly as it is. As Woo tells me during our one-on-one interview, "I don't think any other studio would have made this movie, at least not in the way in which we made it." Many of the studios they pitched the story to would love some of the dream lands like Breakfast Town, but weren't as sold on the family drama at the heart of the story. "I was like, 'What?! That's the whole reason the story exists, like you can't just have a bunch of fluff and no substance.'" Woo says Netflix is showing great leadership in the industry by not just pursuing an original film, but also allowing them to craft an all-ages story that isn't afraid to tackle some challenging subject matter.

"In Your Dreams" boasts some fun needle drops from bands like Outkast and the Eurythmics, as well as an original score from prolific composer John Debney. But the real excitement is that there will be an original song performed by Simu Liu and Emmy Award-winner Cristin Milioti, who voice Stevie and Elliot's musician parents. "Simu and Cristin actually sing it. They perform it," explained Woo. "And I don't know if you know, but Cristin's like an incredible singer. Simu's actually also very, very good. So, we're excited for the world to hear his performance."

The majority of folks probably already know Liu has the Kenergy thanks to his performance as one of the Kens in Greta Gerwig's "Barbie," but general audiences are still slow to learn that the woman who brilliantly brought Sofia Falcone to life on the hit HBO series "The Penguin" is a gifted vocalist. Milioti starred in the original, Tony Award-winning Broadway production of "Once." You haven't lived until you've heard her sing "The Hill" or "Falling Slowly" with Steve Kazee. Listen to it, thank me later, and then get excited about this new song we've yet to hear.

What I found most refreshing during my chat with Woo is that he emphasized wanting to make sure the story never talked down to young audiences. "You know, I think kids, they wanna know the truth of things, they wanna know the truth of the world, and the truth of the world is that it's not always that simple, and there are a lot of challenging things," he tells me. "I think if we don't give that to them in the form of movies, they're gonna find it elsewhere, and that might explain why kids are going to YouTube and social media because maybe the guardrails on those formats are a lot wider because they're newer mediums."

Woo believes that the onus is on filmmakers to try to meet the audience where they are and what they're looking for, and that was a major priority when writing the story. "What we tried to do with this film is not talk down to kids but to tell them, 'Hey, this is at least this was what my life was like, it's probably what your life is like, so if it resonates with me, it's probably gonna resonate with you,'" he says.

As tech oligarchs continue trying to convince the world that artificial intelligence, specifically, generative AI, is a necessary part of all of our lives (spoiler alert: it is not), creatives have been pushing back against the normalization of it. OpenAI is currently spending $30 million on an animated movie called "Critterz" that, despite having (disappointingly) the writers of "Paddington 3" on the script, looks like the result of a failed witch's curse. Fortunately, the team behind "In Your Dreams" assures us that there is no AI in the film, because ... well, Ice Cube said it best on his episode of "The Studio," so I'll let him do the talking.

AI of this caliber has only been available commercially for the last year or so — when "In Your Dreams" was, for the most part, completed — so even if they wanted to use AI, the tech wasn't there yet. Even better, they don't ever want to use AI, because it sort of defeats the entire purpose of animation. "There's just something about the aesthetic that I don't like, and obviously, the process is not very human," Woo explains. "The whole point of making art is to bring sort of the human side and the human soul into the work, and I feel like AI can't do that. So, yeah, we don't use it at all." And the world is better for it.

"In Your Dreams is set for a limited theatrical release on November 7, 2025, before its release on Netflix on November 14, 2025.