A unique, thought-provoking animated adventure for kids? In Your Dreams

So begins an inoffensive, Inside Out-like adventure (if we’re being generous) through the siblings’ shared subconscious, where low-hanging fart jokes are matched by half-considered insights and stereotypical needledrops of Eurythmics and Metallica. As Stevie and Elliot snooze through a variety of dream scenarios Freud would find tedious, ranging from accidental nakedness to unexpected exams, they’re sometimes accompanied by the ambulatory bed of Little Nemo (which was already disappointingly adapted for Netflix in Slumberland, an even more dead-eyed dream film) and Elliot’s stuffed giraffe, Baloney Tony (Craig Robinson), who fills the imaginary friend role and moves a bit like the cheap felt puppets from Wonder Showzen. Neither have any more personality or energy than the one-note kids they schlep from montage to montage.

Inside these various dreamworlds, the kids encounter a series of goofy blobs, be they sentient breakfast foods or sand-critters living in The Sandman’s Sand Castle, as forgettable as their homes. Considering the limitless directions In Your Dreams could go—not only in terms of story, but in terms of aesthetic (an untapped potential the film briefly hints at when momentarily shifting styles towards an anime pastiche)—the film uses the same kind of flavorlessly smooth CG as some of the other collaborations between Netflix Animation and Sony Pictures Imageworks, like Over The Moon and Vivo. Its mix of high-grade, realistic details, like hair that obviously took plenty of processing power to animate, and dully rounded cartoonishness gives the film an air of disinterested professionalism.

That same hand-waving slickness comes through in the specifics of Stevie’s journey to fulfill her vague desire for a more tranquil family. She’ll learn her lesson, that accomplishing this is far harder than just simply wishing for it, though getting to that point is deeply circuitous. One of its detours comes when Elliot, almost entirely broad comic relief, gets a last-minute side quest when In Your Dreams decides it also wants to tackle Stevie’s ill-defined resentment of her baby brother. The film’s thematic inconsistency and half-baked characters—The Sandman and his pleasant illusions are as hazy as Nightmara (Gia Carides), the specter of bad dreams who shows up for a single scene—recall the slipshod Moana sequel that was Frankensteined together from a scrapped TV series. Logical leaps and distracting story digressions make it seem like character motivations, the magical rules of dreams, and much of the time the family spends in the real world (including a Chuck E. Cheese-like pizza parlor in which that take on “Don’t Cha” is sung) were lost in the edit. But considering that the film opens with the hackneyed freeze-frame, “Yep, that’s me” voiceover pairing, perhaps In Your Dreams was designed to only be half-remembered.

That would also be the only way, aside from running through the same headings in everyone’s dream journal, in which In Your Dreams actually reflects its central topic. But this is not really a film about dreams. It’s a film where kids must accept their imperfect reality rather than chase the anodyne nostalgia that can only be found in fantasies. This is a practical moral, if not an especially heartfelt or entertaining one, blaring like an alarm clock compared to those in Pixar’s adroit tearjerkers. Even granting that the brisk children’s film, less than 80 minutes before credits, doesn’t have the time nor the ambition to explore the loopy possibilities and terrifying fears of dreams—let alone their psychological weight—In Your Dreams is still a surprisingly inelegant and generic fable, a bedtime story rushed through by an overtired parent.

Director: Alex Woo
Writer: Alex Woo, Erik Benson
Starring: Craig Robinson, Simu Liu, Cristin Milioti, Jolie Hoang-Rappaport, Elias Janssen, Gia Carides, Omid Djalili, SungWon Cho, Zachary Noah Piser
Release Date: November 7, 2025; November 14, 2025 (Netflix)