When In Your Dreams lands on the 2025 movie schedule later this fall, it will be Alex Woo’s feature directorial debut. However, the writer and director behind the upcoming Netflix original film about two siblings going to great lengths to keep their family together isn’t the only major project Woo has worked on over the years. In fact, he had years of experience working on some of the best Pixar movies.
This summer, I was invited by Netflix to attend a special press day event for In Your Dreams. There, I got a tease for the movie before its November 14 debut, an early look at the fantastical trailer that just dropped, and interviewed the creative team. The day wrapped with a chat with Woo, where he discussed the highly personal project and what he learned from his experiences on Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Cars 2:
[Ratatouille’s] Brad Bird was my first director, and seeing his brain work and seeing how he thought about story and film was probably the best education I could have gotten in storytelling and in filmmaking. Working for Andrew Stanton [on WALL-E] was incredible. He really taught me the power of subtext, because most of that movie is without dialogue, it's all subtext. So that was incredibly educational for me. And then I worked on Cars 2 with John Lasseter; that movie's not great, it's not their best movie, but what I learned from him was the power of comedy.
From 2007 to 2018, Woo served as a story artist on those three films, as well as The Good Dinosaur and The Incredibles 2. He also worked as a story lead on Finding Dory near the end of his time at Pixar. Working on all of these movies, and the lessons he learned along the way, is something that the first-time feature-length director hoped to bring with him to In Your Dreams:
The hope is that I've sort of taken the best of all those experiences and put them into the film.
Though I have yet to see the entire movie at the time of this writing, Netflix showed me the first 30 minutes of In Your Dreams at the press event, and those lessons Woo learned at Pixar were present throughout that half-hour chunk. From the emotional beats to creating wildly imaginative worlds to writing fully-realized and nuanced characters to out-of-this-world animation, it’s all there. And don’t get me started on the comedy, which reaches insane heights once Craig Robinson’s Baloney Tony is introduced.
It will be interesting to see how Woo’s experiences with Pixar, Lucasfilm and Go! Go! Cory Carson, his 2020 Netflix animated series that helped open the door for In Your Dreams to become a reality, come into play when the movie becomes available with a Netflix subscription in November.
Until then, maybe I should take this as an excuse to go back and re-watch Ratatouille, WALL-E, Cars 2 and all of those other great Pixar movies that Alex Woo worked on before he created the highly-anticipated and eye-popping In Your Dreams.
