Life Is ‘Really Messy, But That’s Okay’: ‘In Your Dreams’ Directors On Their Netflix Family Feature, Out Now (EXCLUSIVE VIDEO)

Cartoon Brew and Netflix recently teamed up to host a special FYC screening in Los Angeles for In Your Dreams, the new animated feature from directors Alex Woo and Erik Benson, followed by an in-depth conversation moderated by Carlos Aguilar.

Over the course of the discussion, Woo and Benson reflected on the film’s deeply personal origins, the process of designing a dreamworld with emotional stakes, and the creative unpredictability behind some of the movie’s most memorable characters.

What Dreams are Made Of

Woo explained that the earliest version of the film began back in 2017, shortly after he and Benson founded Kuku Studios. “We had started KukuStudios in 2016, and we spent the first year just sort of dreaming up ideas for TV shows and for movies that we wanted to see that we felt like nobody else was making,” he said. “And one of the ideas was a movie about the world of dreams.”

What surprised the duo was that animation had never tackled dreams head-on, despite its surreal nature and universal relatability. But the freedom of the concept quickly revealed a creative challenge: without grounding, a world where “anything can happen” loses meaning.

Woo turned to his own childhood for a way in. “This movie was sort of like a waking, or sort of a reconciliation with the idea that families aren’t perfect and people aren’t perfect, and life isn’t perfect, but that’s okay,” he said. “That’s what builds bonds and strengthens relationships.”

Raising the Stakes

To connect the real world with the dream realm, they expanded on the mythology of the Sandman. Woo explained, “If the Sandman could make your dreams come true in the dream world, then you suddenly had stakes, and you could connect what happened in the dream world with the real world.”

Benson added that the Sandman and Nightmara were conceived as visual and emotional opposites, noting that Sandman was designed as “this sort of big, fun, curvy guy” while Nightmara embodied “these very sharp edges, aqueous, very moody and mysterious.”

Because the film could venture into any imaginable dreamscape, the filmmakers grounded each environment in Stevie and Elliot’s lived experiences. Woo said, “Almost every single dreamscape that they visit is somehow set up or connected to an experience that they have in the real world.” Breakfast Town, for example, emerges from Stevie’s emotional association with family breakfasts. “Breakfast sort of represents family to her,” Woo explained.

One of the film’s breakout characters, Baloney Tony, grew from the directors’ desire to give the kids a dream guide who wasn’t comforting or convincing. Benson recalled, “We always wanted him to be a stuffy… but we also wanted him to challenge Stevie, right? And Stevie, this perfectionist, this idealist, we knew he should be a disgusting thing that would gross her out and be best friends with her little brother.”

Woo traced the idea back to his brother’s stuffed bear from his own childhood, saying, “He sort of embraced the disgusting mess of his stuffy, and that’s kind of what Stevie needs to learn. She needs to embrace the messiness of life.”

Important Imperfections

The same blend of absurd humor and character insight also produced Delilah, the eerie “perfect princess” figure who appears in one of the film’s most laugh-out-loud sequences. Benson revealed that he originally voiced her as a scratch track recorded at home in his bedroom closet: “I opened up my iPhone and just went, ‘I’m a perfect princess.’”

Even professional voice actors couldn’t replicate what he called that “weird in the bedroom closet flavor,” so the original iPhone recording remains in the film. Woo appreciated how the bit tied back to Stevie’s emotional core, saying, “It seems so random, but it’s actually thematically so perfect because Stevie’s problem is that she’s a perfect princess.”

Balancing that humor with the film’s emotional weight required constant refinement. Woo explained, “I grew up on films that I loved laughing so hard till I cried and then feeling so deeply that I cried. And so those are the emotions that I tried to put into this film.”

They described one scene that initially played too heavily until they added Elliot softly humming, emphasizing the importance of improv, even in well-scripted animation. “We just called [voice actor] Elias [Janssen], and we said, Hey, can you hum this song for us?” Woo said. “They put it in… and that suddenly just lifted that whole moment up.”

An Odd Couple

The directors’ long friendship helped guide them through the extensive production schedule. Benson joked that their shared office years ago looked “very much like Stevie and Elliot’s bedroom,” with Woo’s half impeccably organized and Benson’s half “very much a mess.” Woo said their creative disagreements were actually productive: “That’s actually the best part of the process and that’s actually where something new emerges.”

Finding the right actors to play Stevie and Elliot was also key. Woo said that Jolie Hoang-Rapparport, who voices Stevie, was only around 15 years old when cast, but carried “this old soul quality to her,” while Elias Janssen (Elliot), nine at the time of casting, surprised them with the contrast between his real-life demeanor and his energetic performance. The pair also praised Simu Liu and Kristen Milioti, who played mom and dad, with Woo recalling how long he’d admired Milioti’s versatility, since they both worked on the Adult Swim fan favorite series The Venture Brothers.

Takeaways

As the film arrives on Netflix, Woo shared what he hopes viewers will take from it. “Life is imperfect. It’s really messy, but that’s okay… getting through that messiness with the people you love is what makes life meaningful.”

Benson echoed the sentiment, saying the film reflects how “we all design our lives to be a certain way, but they never go the way we anticipate. But if we lean on each other… that is the constant.”