In Your Dreams

In Your Dreams is a 2024 Netflix animated movie about two young siblings, Stevie and Max, who enter a magical dreamworld every night. There, they meet the Sandman, who grants wishes, but things get complicated when their parents’ troubled marriage starts bleeding into their dreams. With the help of some quirky creatures, the kids try to fix their family while navigating weird, shifting dream landscapes.

In Your Dreams Mini-Review

An older child who learns to like a younger sibling is nothing new in children’s movies. There are dozens of examples, and while Netflix’s In Your Dreams certainly isn’t the best example, neither is it the worst.

                   

In Your Dreams is a high-energy tale with a lot going for it, at least as far as direct-to-streaming content goes. The voice talent is solid, the animation is slightly north of generic, and there’s just enough originality and whimsy to entertain the kids without making parents regret their life choices.

Arguably, the best thing this flick has going for it is its pacing. Unlike the recently released Wicked: For Good, which is all but ruined by its stuttering storytelling, In Your Dreams’ pacing is excellent. It’s brisk and bouncy, and even though the story only makes a perfunctory attempt to reach the deeper psychological and emotional notes intrinsic to its plot, structurally, it’s smooth and seamless. What it lacks in narrative texture, it makes up for in flow and efficiency.

The resulting family film is, unless you’re sitting down to critique it, moderately enjoyable. Too bad the filmmakers weren’t as concerned with messaging.

PARENTAL NOTES

Rated Safe (by Netflix) for 7+. You decide.

Mature and Stressful

• The plot centers on a husband and wife who are struggling with the everyday stresses of adult life, like paying the mortgage on a limited income, and with the threat of divorce.
  • It’s an ever-present, oppressive shadow that hangs over the entire program, and while, as a rule, I’m not against high stakes and significant tension in family programming, the fact that the conflict lies at the foundational core of stability for children makes In Your Dreams feel too mature for most children. It’s certainly not a concept I want my kids to concern themselves with, and if little ones from broken homes or homes on the verge of breaking were to watch it, I can’t imagine they’d finish the program feeling good about their current situation.

Butt Stuff

• There’s some body humor that some might find goes too far.
  • At one point, a skyscraper-sized anthropomorphic hot dog person swallows a little boy, who speeds through its digestive tract and is violently excreted from the other end. The boy bursts through what was the hot dog’s unmarred bottom, letting out a long, wet fart, leaving a hole that very closely resembles a human’s emergency exit.
  • In a scene that I feel should eliminate it completely from your child’s upcoming viewing, both the 8-year-old boy and his 12-year-old sister, who are sharing the same dream, appear naked in a shopping mall. She is in the center of a clothing rack and completely covered, but still naked in public. The boy, however, is completely nude, with his privates pixelated. His living, stuffed animal friend is also pixelated.
    • The teenage boy, the tween-aged girl has crushed on throughout, is there, looking at her.
    • The 8-year-old boy struts around and asks something to the effect of “What’s wrong with this?” His stuffed companion, in a suggestive voice, says, “Absolutely nothing,” as he struts onto the screen.
• 

Morbid and/or Edgy

• There are a couple of elements that might be a bit too much for sensitive viewers.
  • In one of the dream worlds, sentient food turns into zombies that attack the children, and the zombie designs, though softened thanks to being food people rather than real people, are fairly traditional zombie-esque.
  • One character yells, “You dirty custard,” at another. Obviously, this is an allusion to the phrase, you dirty bastard.
  • The girl wakes up in a large fountain filled with sugary cereal. A juvenile piece of toast tells his dad that there’s a “dead girl” in the fountain.

WOKE REPORT

Modern Dynamics

• Although the father is portrayed as loving and present, he’s also an overweight loser who won’t let go of his past glory days as a local musician in order to step up and be the man of the house, leaving it to his far more responsible and practical wife to be the breadwinner.
  • The wokeness is somewhat balanced out because he is such an involved parent. His children love and respect him, and even though the couple is having problems in their relationship, the film doesn’t use it as an excuse for her to run him down.
    • It is implicit that his impracticality and unwillingness to accept that making it in music won’t happen are the reasons they are having issues.
    •  Mathematically speaking, the dad’s limited presence, the vague portrayal of his role in the family’s troubles, and his generally positive depiction as a father all reduced the impact on our Woke-O-Meter score. That doesn’t mean I want my kids watching it, especially when there are better-made alternatives with similar positive messaging available.
• The daughter is bright, goal-oriented, and driven. The son is sloppy, dumpy, and dumb.
  • I don’t recall the gag, but there was a joke about the boy’s lack of intelligence helping him in a particular situation.
    • This is another instance in which the gag, while a woke trope, is sufficiently limited in scope to warrant only a tiny bump in the Woke-O-Meter. At this point, it’s also enough for me to keep it from my kids.

Getting A Pass

• The cartoon depicts a couple on the brink of splitting up, yet it never truly engages with their issues beyond a plot device. Since resolving them isn’t essential to the story, they’re brushed aside at the end, leaving us with a moral that’s strangely indifferent to whether they reconcile. It’s unsatisfying, though not inherently “woke.”
  • What does feel woke is the implied modern left-leaning notion, intentional or not, that walking away from a marriage simply because you’re not constantly happy is the best option for everyone, kids included. The moral of the story seems to be that, once children are made to accept that their parents will continue loving them even after a divorce, the divorce itself isn’t really that big of a deal.
    • If you had to bet money on it, how many of the 2.1 million OnlyFans creators would you guess came from broken homes? There aren’t any stats (I looked), but my guess is virtually all of them.
    • This messaging accounts for the lion’s share of our Woke-ish rating, and it’s enough on its own for me to keep my kids from watching it.