In Your Dreams

In Your Dreams (2025) is an animated family adventure comedy directed by Alex Woo in his feature directorial debut and co-directed by Erik Benson. Produced by Netflix Animation and Kuku Studios, the film centers on twelve-year-old Stevie Ting, an anxious and hyper-organized girl struggling to preserve stability as her family fractures. Her younger brother, eight-year-old Elliot, is a chaotic, messy aspiring magician whose antics Stevie frequently blames for household stress.

At home, parents Joanne, a musician-turned-educator, and Michael, an indie folk/rock musician clinging to his artistic ambitions, find themselves trapped in escalating marital conflict. Joanne considers accepting a stable teaching post in Duluth, Minnesota, while Michael resists uprooting his life and abandoning his music career. Fearing their parents are on the brink of divorce, the siblings discover a mysterious occult volume titled The Legend of the Sandman in a local thrift shop.

Chanting a spell from the book, Stevie and Elliot cross into a shared dream world. Reunited with Elliot's eccentric plush giraffe Baloney Tony, the children embark on an odyssey across wild subconscious landscapes—battling living breakfast items and evading the nightmare queen Nightmara—to convince the legendary Sandman to grant their wish for an unbroken, perfect family.

The core message of the film challenges the conventional fairy-tale trope of wish-fulfillment by addressing the existential question: What do you do when your dreams do not come true?

The narrative emphasizes that an idealized, static 'perfection' is merely an escapist illusion. True emotional maturity and resilience stem not from forcing external circumstances to match childhood desires, but from learning to process grief, navigate uncertainty, and find mutual strength through unconditional familial love even when structural norms change.

Under a Jungian psychological lens, the dream world embodies Stevie's internal psyche; Nightmara serves not as an antagonist but as Stevie's shadow self pushing her to acknowledge grief, while the Sandman represents ego-driven denial offering stasis.

Arriving alongside animated features that examine inner emotional life, In Your Dreams was acclaimed by family advocates for its thoughtful approach to parental divorce. By declining to frame marital separation as a catastrophic failing or a puzzle for children to fix, the film validates pediatric emotional stress while showing that love persists even when family structures adapt.

In Your Dreams earned positive aggregated reactions, holding a 78% positive critical consensus. Reviewers celebrated the nuanced, emotionally mature script, the performances of Jolie Hoang-Rappaport, Elias Janssen, and Craig Robinson, and the dynamic blend of 3D and 2D animation styles. Minor criticisms focused on the middle act's slapstick humor and occasional low tension stemming from the dream premise.