“In Your Dreams” was made for Netflix by a team of artists who cut their teeth at Pixar (the director, Alex Woo, was a story artist on films like “Ratatouille,” “WALL-E,” and “Incredibles 2”), and it’s one of those animated movies that keeps reminding you of other animated movies (not all of them Pixar), which even if you like the films in question is not really a good thing. “In Your Dreams” is built around great swirling mounds of imagistic energy, yet it feels secondhand at its core.
Stevie (voiced by Jolie Hoang-Rappaport), a precocious 12-year-old, discovers that her parents may be breaking up. They were once a local indie music duo called Hypsonics, but Mom (Crisin Milioti) now wants to move to Duluth to become an assistant professor, while Dad (Simu Liu), a roly-poly slacker, is content to stay planted, whiling away the days diddling with the album he’ll never finish. (Given that they can’t pay the bills, there aren’t really two sides to this rift.) So how will Stevie, who shares a bedroom with her obnoxious little brother, Elliot (Elias Janssen), keep the family together?
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By escaping into a world of dreams, which sounds fancifully original but translates, at heart, into a knockoff of “Inside Out,” with tween angst trying to work itself out in a lavish alternate cosmos. The way that Elliot’s stuffed giraffe, Baloney Tony, comes to life through the rapid-fire smart-mouth voicing of Craig Robinson feels like an overly pointed gloss on Eddie Murphy’s Donkey in the “Shrek” films. And the fact that Stevie and Elliott zoom around on a possessed bed frame seems to have come right out of the affectionately remembered 1971 Disney clunker “Bedknobs and Broomsticks.” Then there’s the Sandman, a kind of Wizard of Oz of the cosmic dunes voiced by the British-born Omid Djalili, who sounds like Jude Law impersonating Santa Claus.
Stevie and Elliot discover that they can be inside the same dream at the same time. As the two plunge in and out of dreams, the movie serves up a series of florid set pieces, most of which serve no narrative purpose beyond their eyeball-tickling show-reel dimension. The kids are first dropped into a cardboard-castle land inhabited by walking, talking pieces of food (donuts, strawberries, avocados, French toast, hard-boiled eggs), which a few minutes later turn moldy and rotten and threatening. And that’s the way it goes with most of these dreams; they become nightmares, which peter out the moment Stevie and Elliot wake up. “Why did I wake up when you woke up?” asks Stevie. Why? Because that’s the arbitrary rules of the movie they’re in. At one point there’s a bad-dream montage, set to (inevitable needle drop #1) “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” and it’s at that point the audience realizes that none of this is actually affecting the characters’ waking lives, so how much investment can we have in it?
You just know that the Sandman, at one point heralded by (inevitable needle drop #2) Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” is going to turn out to be less nice than he seems. But it’s what he represents that’s the problem. “I want everyone to be happy,” he says, sounding like the spirit of psychotropic big pharma. And when he finally places Stevie and Elliot in a dream that will heal their parents’ split and make everyone’s lives perfect again, that’s the problem: It’s only a dream. Do they want to live inside a feel-good illusion? That should have probably been the film’s premise rather than just another anything-goes gambit. “In Your Dreams,” minus the closing credits, is only 77 minutes long, and it packs in a great deal of frenetic dreamscape pageantry, but I wish there were more of an imaginative heft to it. It’s like the surface of a Pixar movie without the engine of ingenuity.
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