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Annecy: ‘In Your Dreams' Director Alex Woo Talks Netflix's Animated Epic
Netflix's 'In Your Dreams' is nearly here.
The animated epic, about a pair of siblings (voiced by Jolie Hoang-Rappaport and Elias Janssen), who travel into the world of dreams to find The Sandman, in an effort to have their ultimate wish granted, arrives on the streaming service on Nov. 14. But we got a sneak-peek at the movie at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. You can watch the brand-new trailer below.
TheWrap spoke to 'In Your Dreams' director Alex Woo at the festival, who told us that he first had the idea for a movie about dreams back in 2017, shortly after leaving Pixar. He did the math in his head. 'So, yeah, nine years,' Woo said. He acknowledges that the idea of an animated feature set in the world of dreams had been considered at many animation studios; countless films were developed but never finished. It's an intriguing concept but hard to actualize. Still, Woo persisted.
'I just love the story and I love the characters and I felt like it was a story that was really going to move people,' Woo said, about what kept him going. 'It was going to resonate with people. It would make them laugh and it would make them cry. I think it was just how much I believed in the story and how much I wanted to see it brought to fruition and brought to reality.'
For his team, Woo recruited Steve Pilcher, a Pixar vet who, at the time, was finishing up work on Pete Docter's 'Soul.' Pilcher would be the production designer on the project. 'We have a shared love of a lot of things, and I think I just knew that we had a similar aesthetic and a similar sensibility,' Woo said. 'I called him and I was like, 'Hey man, you want to jump ship and work on this crazy dream?''
Pilcher said that he was seduced by the idea of working for a smaller studio. When Woo pitched the movie, he was flooded with 'so many possibilities.' 'It was another film that was two worlds,' Pilcher said of the similarities between 'Soul' and 'In Your Dreams.' (There was an element of 'Soul' where a part of the astral plane was actually 'dreams.' While the concept was largely removed from the finished movie, Pilcher remembered it.)
In terms of guiding principles for the movie, Woo said, 'I think everything needed to be sincere. We never wanted to put something in the movie that didn't feel like it was one of our authentic experiences. That's when you get into dangerous territory and it goes into cliché is, you're not drawing from something that's connected to who you are or what you've experienced. I don't think there's a single thing we put in there that didn't come from somebody's authentic experience.'
And unlike most major animated movies, Woo said that 'In Your Dreams' never hit a wall and had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Instead, there were small things that were tweaked and reworked. But it mostly stayed the same. 'When I pitched the film to Netflix, I put together a 30-minute beat board pitch. It was the entire shape of the story. And it was a really solid, beautiful pitch,' Woo remembered. 'I don't like going into something if I don't have a really clear idea of how everything works together. And I think, because the pitch was so thought-out and so solid, we got a green light very quickly, and then the script was based off of that outline.'
Sounds like a – wait for it – dream production.
'In Your Dreams' hits Netflix on Nov. 14.
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