(courtesy IMP Awards)
As a lifelong fan of animation, one of the things that I love about the artform, and which still holds true even in the face of ever more sophisticated CGI, is how much it emboldens and empowers the imagination.
If you dream it, and good lord there are a lot of brilliantly talented people out there who can dream some mightily wonderful things, animation can bring it to life, and armed with a feisty clever funny story, you have all the ingredients you need for some truly original storytelling.
Just how original and thoughtfully intelligent animation can be is on full display in In Your Dreams, directed by Alex Woo to a screen play he cowrote with Erik Benson (from a story by Woo and Stanley Moore) which, while it might come from the mighty factory of animated imagination that is Pixar, nevertheless some expansively expressive visual storytelling that also comes with a real emotional punch.
It’s a perfect mix of heart and spectacle that goes deep in its emotional focus, as siblings Stevie and Elliot Ting (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport and Elias Janssen respectively) struggle to work out how to keep their parents together in the face of a stale marriage and an enticing job offer for mum Joanne (Cristin Milioti) which could see the two kids living in different cities.
It’s not an enticing prospect, even if Elliot, all boyish mess and boisterous enthusiasm, does drive tidy, careful, emotionally reticent Stevie up the big sister wall, and while Elliot is gleefully oblivious toe the brewing storm in the family, Stevie is anxious to somehow put it right, resorting to hamfisted techniques like cooking her mum’s favourite breakfast and saying her father Michael (Simi Liu) did it.
It’s a very Parent Trap approach but it doesn’t quite work because Stevie is a kid and doesn’t understand that what breaks a marriage, or is coming close to breaking it, anyway, can’t necessarily be fixed by pancakes.
But then she and Elliot discover a magical book in a part of a secondhand store they shouldn’t be in, The Legend of the Sandman, which promises that, properly summoned, the titular character can fix, through powerfully immersive dreams, what is broken in the real world.
It sounds too good to be true, but when Stevie and Elliot accidentally psychically link themselves by repeating the summoning mantra in the book and plunge into a dream which feels all too real and sees them riding high above the clouds of Elliot’s bucking bronco of a bed, it becomes clear, at least in their childish minds, that here’s the solution to all their problems.
Where In Your Dreams really shows some emotional sophistication is in introducing the idea of nightmares, which we automatically assume must be bad things because of the subject matter, but the film asks us to consider, much like Inside Out did when it proposed that you can’t have the happy without the sad, whether nightmares, given to us by Nightmara, Queen of Nightmares, are in fact the evil we think them to be.
Could it be, ponders In Your Dreams, and at a crucial point in the film, that nightmares might in fact be a protective mechanism against the ability of dreams, and the Sandman in particular (and yes, they do use the song in some very clever and highly amusing ways) to give us every thing we want even at the expense of what we really need?
If that all sounds a bit weighty and heavy for a piece of family-focused animation, consider that In Your Dreams is part of a long and rightly lauded tradition of animated films going deep and dark even as they dazzle with technicolour wonder and imagination.
By introducing the seemingly dark along the light of what Sandman is offering, and yes, he guarantees he can fix Steve’s family woes if only she’ll lose herself in his sandglass-controlled dreaming, the film imbues itself with some truly moving emotional heft.
There are quite a few times, especially in the final act where Stevie learns an important lesson about if things look too good to be true, they could very well be, and that maybe Elliot is a better brother than she ever realised, where you feel your heart ripped out of your body and tenderly placed back in, a very Pixar technique which In Your Dreams uses to great effect.
When it’s taking you to some very dark and emotionally thoughtful places, In Your Dreams delights in some very goofy, very funny and highly clever imaginative dreamy world-building.
Elliot’s bucking bronco bed aside, which comes to the rescue quite a few times as the story escalates, there’s one particular sequence where the siblings land in Stevie’s conjured land of “Breakfast Town” where talking cereal and fruit create a fun and lively atmosphere where, Cheers-like, everyone knows Stevie’s name and everything feels happily and delightfully contentedly possible.
It’s one of the best sequences in the film, made all the more impressive by the fact that when Stevie and Elliot make the rookie mistake of trying to actively find the Sandman and summon Nightmara instead, all those cute breakfasty things grow monstrously mouldy and terrifying.
If ever there was an allegory of life, this is it, and the seamless switch from sunny, goofy escapism to dark foreboding and outright terror marks In Your Dreams as something special because it doesn’t pretend that life is all sunshine and lightness, even in your dreams and that what look like easy fixes may not in the end be anything of the kind.
A heartwarming, funny and hugely, cleverly imaginative film, In Your Dreams is a gem, a thoughtfully affecting film that knows life can be scary and depressing right alongside all the good stuff, and that much as we want everything to be happily ever after, that may not always be as easy as it looks to achieve.
Quite where Stevie and Elliot end up after some very interesting adventures in the world of Sandman and Nightmara, and what this means for them in the real world must be left to the viewing, but suffice to say your heart will be warmed, our tendency to look for easy fixes cautioned, and those parts of you which think what is obviously good must be so through and through will find themselves wising up even as they discover how good you think you may have overlooked can be.