Shadows on the Wall | In Your Dreams

In Your Dreams

dir Alexander Woo
scr Erik Benson, Alexander Woo
prd Timothy Hahn, Gregg Taylor
voices Jolie Hoang-Rappaport, Elias Janssen, Craig Robinson, Simu Liu, Cristin Milioti, Omid Djalili, Gia Carides, Zachary Noah Piser, Erik Benson, SungWon Cho, Hailey Magpali, Jorge Diaz
release US/UK 7.Nov.25
25/US Netflix 1h30

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Animated with an attention to detail, this imaginative adventure is packed with references to fantasies throughout movie history. This knowing depiction of how art sparks creativity allows director-cowriter Alexander Woo to take a deep dive into the connections between our most idealistic dreams and everyday realities. It also features wonderfully quirky characters who linger in the memory, largely because it's so easy to identify with the story.

In Minnesota, young teen Stevie (Hoang-Rappaport) dreams about her idyllic life with her musician parents (Liu and Milioti) before her annoying brother Elliot (Janssen) came along. And now her parents are arguing about their future, sparking darkly shaded nightmares that are shared between Stevie and Elliot. This is because of a book about the Sandman (Djalili), who promises to make dreams come true. Hoping to fix their family, Stevie and Elliot team up in their sleep, accompanied by long-forgotten stuffed giraffe Baloney Tony (Robinson), braving the fearsome Nightmara (Carides) to get to the Sandman's castle.

While the designs feel somewhat familiar, subtle animated touches bring characters and settings to life with astonishing insight. So while we're laughing at the wildly outrageous action or the running fart jokes, we are able to see right into the characters' hearts, understanding the longings that they are struggling to express, even to themselves. This makes their interaction unusually resonant, because even the jaggedly sarcastic moments have underlying truth to them.

Clever flourishes abound in dreams, such as the bonkers breakfast-populated cardboard town that echoes the family's morning routine, then shifts into mouldy horror when Stevie begins worrying about her parents splitting up. Sandman's castle is a gorgeously shifting Escher maze. Eye-catching sequences let the characters burst forth as anime superheroes. And the mischievous Elliot commandeers his bed as a flying stallion, adding echoes from Bedknobs and Broomsticks to Time Bandits to, of course, E.T.

Adding Stevie's emotive mindset is her crush on a hilariously moody shop clerk (Piser) who pops up again working at a deranged pizza parlour. This is about a young person who worries that change might be coming to both her family and herself, then sets out to make things right in ways that defy reason. This is such a powerful human urge that we not only recognise it in ourselves but also in a larger political context. And Stevie's ultimate lesson is a strikingly honest reminder that nightmares give us strength to face the real world rather than hide from it.

themes, language, violence 8.Nov.25

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