Director Alex Woo looks into his past for animated film 'In Your Dreams'

When he woke up in the morning and looked at the list, he said, “It didn’t make any sense. Most dreams are just a jumble of strange synapses firing in your brain and you’re just trying to make sense of all the things that happened to you during the previous day.”

Older dreams formed the basis of a film about a girl, her brother and the potential decay of their family. In “Dreams,” Stevie is worried her parents are splitting when her mother lands a position at a college in Duluth, Minnesota.

“I drew a lot of inspiration from my own life,” Woo says. “My parents, when I was a kid, nearly split up. And when that happened, all I wanted was to try and find a way to keep my family together.”

That’s the goal for Stevie, too. In the process, she and her brother Elliot encounter all sorts of friendly (and not-so-friendly) creatures who appear in their shared dream. Along for the ride: Elliot's stuffed animal, Baloney Tony.

The one-eyed creature was inspired by Woo and co-director Erik Benson’s childhoods. Benson “had a My Pet Monster as a kid and he was one of four kids," Woo says. "When you’re young, your brothers and sisters are always stealing your toys and snacks, so his Pet Monster had a little popped seam on the side, and he would hide his toys and the snacks there that he didn’t want to be stolen. So that’s where the baloney pocket came from.”

Woo and his brother got polar bears that had Santa hats on them.

“My brother got a bloody nose one night and he got blood stains all over the rear end of it," Woo shares. "Me being the older brother, I tortured him by nicknaming it ‘butthole bear,’ much to his chagrin. But it didn’t matter. He still loved that thing. He slept with it every night.

“There’s something so beautiful that my brother embraced this mess … and that’s the kind of thing Stevie needed to learn in the film.”

Woo, a veteran of several Pixar films, was able to include other recurring dreams — including one where’s he’s naked in a department store.

“It’s a dream I’ve had for a long time and there’s something so cruel and poetically ironic about that dream,” Woo says. “I’m surrounded by clothes, but I can’t wear any of them. I don’t know what it means, but I should probably talk to someone.”

The idea of investigating dreams was a longtime goal for the veteran animator: “Both the literal dreams we have at night when we sleep, but also the metaphorical dreams we aspire to and chase when we’re away. There’s something really juicy about that thematically.”

Childhood dreams piqued his interest because “there’s so much pressure on people, especially young people, to live these perfect lives," he says. "When there’s an over-emphasis on it, you feel like if you don’t achieve your dreams, there’s something wrong with you. And that’s not true.” 

When he told his family about the film — and his concern with them talking about splitting — they were taken aback.

Mom understood, but Dad “was a bit more uncomfortable. He was like, ‘At least tell people that we’re still together.’ And I was like, ‘OK, I’m happy to do that.’”

Even better? Woo pays homage to his Minnesota home with references to the Vikings, Paul Bunyan and other icons.