Netflix’s animated feature In Your Dreams reaches for a four quadrant crowd and lands in a tonal tug of war. The center is a dreadfully serious story about two kids trying to stall a family break, wrapped in joke-a-minute hijinks and imagery that rarely earns the emotion it is chasing. Released in a season when titles like Nouvelle Vague, Frankenstein, Jay Kelly, and Train Dreams are soaking up awards talk for the streaming service, this one looks like a would-be contender at a glance and plays like something too microwaved to pass as the real deal.
Siblings Stevie and Elliot, voiced by Jolie Hoang-Rappaport and Elias Janssen, dive into their dreamspaces to find the Sandman and fix what feels broken at home. The quest structure sends them through bright corridors of fantasy populated by oddball creatures and shifting rules. The hook should be irresistible, yet the movie keeps treating the dream world as a puzzle box rather than a place to grow character.
The message is heavy. Children staring down a possible separation is potent material, but the film does not build a bridge to the adults in the room and it underserves the kids who are supposed to be its audience. Gags fill the gaps. Some land, some whiff. Craig Robinson, voicing Stevie’s imaginary friend Baloney Tony, steals the biggest laughs and gives the movie a pulse whenever he ambles into a scene.
Much of In Your Dreams plays like a derivative riff on better templates. The obvious comparison is Pixar’s Inside Out, which grounded abstraction in character. This lands closer to Wish and Luck, movies that try to quantify unquantifiable ideas and then get trapped inside their own rules. The plot keeps explaining how dreams work while the relationships flatten.
The visuals do not help. The 3D house style is competent and rarely more than that, which is a problem in a decade when animation is pushing outward. Recent releases like The Wild Robot, Flow, and Across the Spider-Verse have reminded audiences how elastic the medium can be. Even Netflix titles like The Sea Beast and Pinocchio feel richer and more textured. Here the lighting is often blunt, the compositions busy without personality, and the action weightless.
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In Your Dreams wants to hit the jugular and the funny bone at the same time, and it rarely connects with either. The voice cast does what it can, Craig Robinson most of all, but the film’s tonal split and unfinished look turn a promising idea into an inert watch.
Score: 4/10
In Your Dreams (2025)
- Cast: Jolie Hoang-Rappaport, Elias Janssen, Simu Liu, Craig Robinson, Cristin Milioti, Gia Carides, Omid Djalili
- Director: Alex Woo
- Genre: Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Family
- Runtime: 91 minutes
- Rated: PG
- Release Date: November 14, 2025
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