Interview: How Director Alex Woo Found Magic and Mystery With ‘In Your Dreams’
What if your dreams could be… real? That’s what the new Netflix animated film In Your Dreams posits, or moreso, what if your reality was your dream.
In the film, which hits Netflix on November 14, siblings Stevie (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) and Elliott (Elias Janssen) couldn’t be more unalike but they are united in the hope that their parents (voiced by Simu Liu and Cristin Milioti), who are fighting more and appearing to be on the outs, can stay together and they can remain a family. After happening on a secret room in a vintage bookstore, the two find a copy of The Sandman and in it unlocks a portal to the dream world where their wishes can come true as long as they’re aligned. But wishes aren’t always what they seem and in classic animated fashion, hijinks and more ensue.
For director Alex Woo, slugging through the cold winters of Minnesota gave him few outlets for creativity so he turned to animated films and television shows, which inspired his own artwork, a hobby that laid out a path for what would become a life’s work. Ahead of In Your Dreams, his first feature film, Woo was behind the animated TV series Go! Go! Cory Carson and the short films The Rose and I and Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher. In between, he worked in the art departments for Pixar films like Ratatouille, WALL-E and Incredibles 2 and in the Star Wars animated universe of Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
At a recent visit to Netflix’s new animation studio in Burbank, California, I talked to Woo about his journey from Minnesota to California, the mythology of dreams and more. Also including some fun design artwork of the film and the trailer below.
Erik Anderson: First, I kind of want to know what the Alex Woo origin story is, from Minnesota to Netflix Animation.
Alex Woo: So I was born in Minnesota, and there’s not a lot to do in Minnesota, it’s really cold for six to eight months of the year. So I spent a lot of time drawing indoors, and I watched a lot of animated movies as a kid, TV shows, read tons of comics. And I just kind of never grew out of it. When I was 15 or 16, I was still watching animated movies and TV shows, and none of my friends were. And I thought like, “Oh, this is kind of strange.”
So yeah, I was always that kid that liked to draw, and was pretty good at it. But it wasn’t until I was about 17, my parents, my family moved to Hong Kong, which is where my parents are originally from when I was about 15 years old, from Minnesota. So when I was 17, my parents sent me back to the States for summer school at a university, and they wanted me to learn how to live on my own, and get ready for college and adult life. But I had just started dating my high school girlfriend at the time, and so I really wanted to spend my summer with her, but they forced me to go. And they had signed me up for an econometrics class, and an astronomy class, and I was like, “I am not going to spend my summer doing that.”
So I dropped the class, and I took a figure drawing class instead.
EA: Oh, wow.
AW: This was the first sort of formal art class I had ever taken.
EA: How did they feel about that?
AW: Well, they didn’t know (laughs).
EA: (laughs)
AW: So it was one of those charcoal, nude figure drawing classes. So I ended up doing really well in the class, I was like the best draftsman. And the professor afterwards, he was like, “Hey, you should really think about doing something in the arts for a living.” And at that point, I had no conception of what you could do as an artist. I thought artists were poor, and they went insane, and cut off their own ears. So I was like, “That does not sound like a good future.” But he was like, “No, there’s so many legitimate professions for artists.” And he sort of introduced me to the concept of, “You could be an architect, you could be a filmmaker, you could be in animation.”
And when he said the words filmmaker and animation, a light bulb just sort of went off in my head. And I was like, “Oh my God, all those movies and those TV shows that I watch, people do that for a living?” So yeah, I think after that, I think I was just hooked on the idea of being a filmmaker. So I came back, I broke the news to my parents that I had dropped those classes. They were pretty upset, but then I showed them all the drawings I did, and I think for the first time they were like, “Oh, this is not just a childhood,” like a childish hobby, “you actually have some talent.” So I applied to film school, and got in, and then I kind of never looked back. My first job was at Lucasfilm, and then I moved over to Pixar, I was there for 10 years. I worked on Ratatouille, and WALL·E, and I got trained under these incredible directors. And then in 2016-
EA: Were you there in Emeryville or Point Richmond?
AW: Emeryville.
EA: Okay.
Alex Woo: Yeah, yeah. I’m not that old (laughs).
EA: I am (laughs) I lived in Point Richmond for 15 years.
AW: It is, it’s a special place.
EA: It was so great when they were there.
AW: It was a special place, yeah. Did you go to Hidden City Cafe?
EA: All the time. The Easter eggs of it in Pixar films are great.
AW: I’ve only been there once or twice, because I know it’s so legendary, but by the time I joined, it was like 2006. So we were already in the Emeryville campus.
But yeah, then in 2016, I left with Tim, and my other co-founder, Stanley, and we started Kuku Studios. And the logical thing would have been to move down to LA, because that’s where the industry is. But we were like, “This probably isn’t going to work work, so we’ll try it for a couple of years, and if it fails, then we’ll go back to Pixar. Our lives won’t have changed that much.” But, 10 years later, here we are. We’re still alive and kicking as a studio, and we have our first movie coming out, so.
EA: Exactly. That’s incredible. The story origin of this is a lot of your own childhood.
AW: Yeah.
EA: But how do you choose what to include-
AW: And what not to?
EA: … yeah, what to kind of keep for yourself?
AW: I mean, it’s a great question. I don’t know how you do it. It’s a lot of trial and error. I think you put everything on the table, and then you sort of watch it as this movie, and then you kind of gauge what resonates and what doesn’t, with audiences. I mean, that’s the beauty of animation, is that you can make your movie multiple times. And I really think that that’s why animated movies tend to be, on average, stronger narratively than a lot of live-action movies. Because they get so many more at bats, right? It’s like if you only get one draft in an essay, it’s probably not going to be that good. But if you get to write six or seven drafts of it, it’s probably going to be a lot stronger by the sixth or seventh draft.
So that’s a lot of what we did is, I would put everything on the table, watch it, and then you’d realize, “Oh, that stuff isn’t really working. I need to pull that out. But this moment here, it’s really resonating with people.” So it’s a lot of trial and error.
EA: For sure. Something I was thinking about the sort of ambiguity about when the film is set. Because there’s cars from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. There are almost no cell phones.
AW: Yeah.
EA: Tell me about that as not just a deliberate choice, but as a creative choice.
AW: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think I made it deliberately that ambiguous. I knew that I didn’t want too many cell phones in there. They do have phones. But it’s not… We spend so much time on our phones already, I didn’t want to have our characters be spending time on phones, because the audience would be sort of vicariously doing that, and I wanted to be as far away from that as possible. So yeah, it’s supposed to be present day, but the time of place isn’t that critical to the story. So that’s probably why you’re feeling it a little bit, because of that.
EA: Well, it’s clearly more book-curious than anything else. And I think one of the things that cell phones do, certainly in movies is, and in our real lives is, allows so much of a shortcut and a cheat, which kind of robs you of discovery.
AW: Magic.
EA: If you can just Google an answer to something, rather than read The Sandman.
AW: At one point in the film, after she discovers the book she sort of searches on Google, information about the Sandman. But we felt like it sort of took some of the magic away from the film, so it was one of these trial and error things, where we put it up there and we were like, “There’s something about it that totally feels, I don’t know. It doesn’t feel… Yeah, it takes away the magic.” So we took that.
EA: What specifically about the mythology of Sandman inspired you?
AW: I mean, I’ve always been fascinated by dreams. I’ve had very vivid dreams since I was a kid, and I always wondered, where do they come from? As a kid, you don’t think about the neurological thing, right?
EA: Sure.
AW: You just think about, “Maybe there’s some sort of dream god that’s giving me dreams.” And that’s what the Sandman mythology is really about. And so, there’s something about it that really always stuck with me. I love the idea that in the morning, those crusties that you wake up with, were given to you by the Sandman. I still wake up with crusties in the morning, so there’s something about that mythology that’s so fun. And there’s so many different versions of the Sandman. You have Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, which is this kind of dark and broody character. And you have Bill Joyce’s Sandman, who’s kind of like this child, silent, impish character.
And I wanted to do a version of The Sandman that was different than those, that was more like this sort of jovial, avuncular, sort of Santa-type character that gives people not only dreams, but then can grant them their dreams. And that was critical to the story, because if it was just the Sandman being able to give you dreams but not make them come true, then you wouldn’t have any sort of driving force for Stevie to achieve some sort of goal.
EA: And then you have Nightmara, so that-
AW: Balances out.
EA: … that has the evil part, the more Neil Gaiman-like dramatic, kind of scary stuff. I loved that the film also utilizes multiple animation styles.
AW: Exactly.
EA: Can you talk about the creative decision around that? Did the scenes demand that, or were sequences created with that already in mind?
AW: They were not created with that in mind. That sort of came organically.
EA: Nice.
AW: One of the comic books that Elliott looks through in the beginning, is Dynamite. It’s like an anime, Dynamite Fist anime, which is something we made up. That was an idea that we had. It didn’t really, it wasn’t supposed to be a setup for anything, but I was so influenced by anime as a kid. And I thought it would be so fun. Like, I’ve always wanted to be an anime character. And so, it’s just wish fulfillment, I thought. For these kids, especially nowadays, anime is such a fast-growing genre, and it’s so in the zeitgeist that I thought, “Oh, of course you have to have a dream where they become anime characters.” So yeah, it sort of evolved organically.
EA: Tell me a bit about the cast that you put together for this, because it’s an eclectic group and just an incredibly talented group.
AW: It is, yeah. We’re so lucky. So I can talk about Jolie and Elias first. I mean, these kids.
EA: And they are not newbies.
AW: I know, since very, very young. Yeah, it’s really unfair how much talent they have. I mean, we worked with a casting director Mary Hidalgo, and she sent us a lot of different auditions. And for Jolie, the minute we heard her voice in her take, I was like, “Oh, that’s Stevie.” I mean, she is really smart. She’s really responsible. She’s really mature for her age. She’s a bit of a perfectionist. I mean, that’s our Stevie, that’s who she is. So I could feel that, and hear it in her voice, so that was really easy casting.
And Elias, when I heard his audition, he was so rambunctious and spunky. When I met him, I was so surprised that he’s very quiet, and he’s very sort of demure. I was like, “Wow, this kid is just such a great actor, because I couldn’t tell, in his audition.” And so it was phenomenal to have him. And when he started, he was just a little kid. He was like eight years old, nine years old, maybe. And now he’s what, 13? He’s like a teenager. And then Cristin, I mean, I don’t don’t know if you’ve seen her in The Penguin–
EA: Oh, of course.
AW: … but she was amazing. I’ve been a fan of hers since… The first show I worked on as an animator was Venture Brothers, I don’t know if you know that show.
EA: Oh, of course.
AW: But she’s done voices for that show, and I’ve been a fan of hers since that show, and I always wanted to work with her at some point. And so when this feature came up, and you know, she’s also an incredible singer. And so, the parents are musicians so I was like, “Oh my God, she’s kind of perfect for this role.” So we were so fortunate, because she’s really selective about the role she takes. I think she was so moved by the story that she took the role.
EA: Do you have a favorite non-human character and why?
AW: Of course. I mean, it’s Baloney Tony, for sure.
EA: Okay.
AW: I mean, it’s a toss-up between Baloney Tony, and Delilah. Delilah’s like so absurd, and so hilarious. My co-director, Erik Benson, came up with her. And he voices her character.
EA: Oh my God. I love Delilah. “I’m a pretty princess.”
AW: And I just think of him, whenever I see her. It makes me feel so warm inside.
In Your Dreams will be on Netflix November 14.
Visual development art by Aedan Peterson, Tony Fucile, Oona Holtane, Eric Benson, Daniel Arriaga, Jeremy Baudry and Mike Dutton. Cr: Netflix © 2025
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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