Lea Salonga, Liza Soberano film and ‘In Your Dreams’ boost Asian rise in animation

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LOS ANGELES, USA – As Alex Woo’s In Your Dreams recently began streaming on Netflix, another Asian-American directed animation project was announced.

DreamWorks Animation and Universal Pictures’ news of Forgotten Island, to be released in September next year, was impactful because not only is it being directed by Filipino-American Januel Mercado, along with Joel Crawford, the film’s voice cast also stars Filipino icon Lea Salonga and Fil-Ams Liza Soberano, Manny Jacinto, and H.E.R.

It’s the first casting of a mainstream Hollywood movie that has the most Fil-Ams. And there are unconfirmed reports that Forgotten Island’s story, written by Januel and Joel, about how Jo (H.E.R.) and Raissa (Liza) find themselves stranded in the fantastic world of an island named Nakali, is based on Philippine mythology.

But as it is, Forgotten Island is an exciting announcement in terms of strides for Filipino and Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) talent. It is the directing debut of Januel, who co-directed Puss in Boots: The Last Wish with Joel.

The action-adventure animated comedy also stars Dave Franco and Jenny Slate.

Back to In Your Dreams, which Alex wrote with Erik Benson (who co-directed) and Stanley Moore, it is described by Netflix as “a comedy adventure about Stevie and her brother Elliot, who journey into the absurd landscape of their own dreams. If the siblings can withstand a snarky stuffed giraffe, zombie breakfast foods, and the queen of nightmares, the Sandman will grant them their ultimate dream come true…the perfect family.”

In a press conference with Alex and producer Tim Hahn at the Netflix Animation Studios in Burbank, California, Rappler asked about the casting of Fil-Am Hailey Magpali as the voice of the young Stevie.

“Oh my God, you can hear how adorable she is,” Alex gushed about Hailey as the four-year-old lead character. “And we only captured like 10 percent of her adorableness and energy.”

“It was our casting agent who found her. She sent us an audition. When you meet Hailey, she is like this ball of energy. She’s so energetic. She’s just incredibly talented. But just unabashedly herself.”

The filmmaker, who previously worked at Pixar Animation Studios and Lucasfilm, added, “And Hailey just brought this really spunky personality to young Stevie. So, yeah, we couldn’t think of a better actress to open our movie with. Hailey was fantastic.”

Jolie Hoang-Rappaport voices the older Stevie in the film, whose cast includes Simu Liu, Elias Janssen, Craig Robinson, Cristin Milioti, Omid Djalili, Gia Carides, SungWon Cho, and Zachary Noah Piser.

On the major breaks that AAPI talents have been getting in the previously white-dominated world of animation, Alex replied, “We’ve been really fortunate in that we’ve gotten a lot of opportunities. Straight out of college, I got my first job at Lucasfilm. I was working for George Lucas.”

“And then right after that, I moved over to Pixar, and I felt really embraced by that company. I got a lot of great opportunities there. I learned from some great filmmakers.”

Alex, whose Pixar credits as a story artist include Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Incredibles 2, continued, “Obviously, we’re very proud to be representing our community. I feel like I’ve been very fortunate that I haven’t experienced that many obstacles.”

“We get to be a generation that maybe had a little bit of help ahead of us, right? Breaking some of those barriers and then letting us into this industry.”

A plus for In Your Dreams is that its mixed-race family protagonists, voiced by Simu, Cristin, Jolie, Hailey, and Elias, just are; the movie does not make a big deal of the family’s biracial background.

“Something that I find special about the representation both behind and in front of the camera on this film is that it feels authentically Asian American,” Alex pointed out. “Where it’s not like this is an Asian story, but that Asian American representation is there.”

“But I think the film more accurately reflects our experiences growing up in the Midwest, growing up in Southern California, just being American kids.” Alex grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

“That was deliberate on our part,” stressed Alex, who won a Student Academy Award for Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher while he was studying film and TV production at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. “We didn’t want to make this a front and center a story about their Asian identity, right?”

“They’re mixed race, but we didn’t want that to be the forefront. We just wanted that to be part of their world, just like for me. It’s just a part of who I am, but it’s not front and center.”

‘In Your Dreams’ stars Cristin Milioti, Simu Liu, Craig Robinson, and director Alex Woo. Photo from Netflix

In 2016, Alex made the gutsy move to quit Pixar.

“Tim and I left Pixar to start Kuku,” he recounted. “Leaving Pixar to start your own independent animation studio was a little crazy. But Crazy Studios just didn’t have a good ring to it, so I went with Kuku instead.”

“Kuku is a cute-sounding name. That cuckoo. Ku in Chinese means cry. You know those Greek theater masks, like the tragedy and the comedy masks. That was a big inspiration for us for the types of stories we wanted to tell.”

He explained, “And so, Kuku means the two types of crying that you experience when you watch a movie. It’s like tears of laughter, tears of pathos.”

“And we really leaned into all those double meanings. Our logo is the cuckoo clock. We have this prized possession in our lobby, an authentic Bavarian cuckoo clock that a friend sent us.”

Alex said that in a sense, it took nine years to make In Your Dreams. “We started Kuku Studios in 2016. We spent the first year just brainstorming ideas for TV shows and movies that we wanted to make. And one of the ideas was In Your Dreams.”

“That was in November of 2016. We put a pitch together in six months. We pitched it around town. Nobody bought it. Then we put it on the shelf, and then we made our first show, which is Go! Go! Cory Carson. And that took like two or three years.”

Go! Go! Cory Carson, an animated sitcom, was created by Alex and Stanley Moore.

“In about 2020, Netflix got into original features,” Alex recalled. “And they liked what we had done on Go! Go! Cory Carson, so they said, what other ideas do you have?”

“And we said, funny you should ask. So we pulled this idea (In Your Dreams) off the shelf, pitched it to them, they liked it, and they greenlit it. So, we started production in 2020, two months before the pandemic.”

The boyish-looking filmmaker, whose other story lead and storyboard artist credits include Finding Dory and Cars 2, clarified, “So, when we say it’s a nine-year journey adventure, it includes that inception time and from the very kernel of the idea. Production was really from the spring of 2020 through the end of last year.”

Alex revealed that the film’s story of two kids, Stevie and Elliot, trying to save their parents’ marriage, was inspired by his own experience when he was a kid.

“When I was maybe six or seven years old, my mom went away for a little bit, and obviously, it was hard for my brother and me,” he said.

“But yeah, we banded together and we tried all these harebrained schemes to try and get our parents to get back together. And that was the big inspiration for this film.”

Tim shared, “My parents are still together. They’ve been married for 50 years now.”

Craig Robinson voices Baloney Tony, a lovable stuffed giraffe who was inspired by a toy in Alex’s childhood. “My brother used to have this stuffed animal that had this really gross stain on the back,” Alex shared. “We called him Butthole Bear because you can imagine where the stain was.”

“That was a big inspiration for Baloney Tony. We’ve all had that stuffed animal that we loved to death, and we just thought, we gotta put one in our movie. Baloney Tony is really supposed to be the subconscious of Elliot, his id.”

‘In Your Dreams’ is a comedy adventure about Stevie and her little brother Elliot, who journey into the absurd landscape of their own dreams. All stills from Netflix

The fantasy world of dreams and its infinite possibilities, matched by the unlimited potential in animation to create, encouraged Alex and his team to go all out. “It was so obvious to try and take advantage of the medium of animation, and it’s about the world of dreams. You have so many possibilities in a world of dreams.”

He revealed, “I was really heavily influenced by anime as a kid. I always wanted to be an anime character. I feel like that’s what K-pop bands are.”

“They’re just like human versions of anime characters. So, yeah, that was a big inspiration. I wanted to find some way to put that aesthetic into the film.”

“And being in a world of dreams gave us that license to do that. It’s one of my favorite parts of the movie.”

Alex asked his team about their dreams as an inspiration.

“We had basically a day or two where we had everybody in the story team just come up with all of the recurring dreams that they’ve had throughout their life, the dreams that they remember, the scariest dreams, the best dreams that they’ve had,” he shared.

“We collected a list from the whole team, and then we just picked the ones that fit into the narrative. Somebody had a hot dog dream. It was so random.”

Alex admitted that he has a recurring dream of being naked.

“I’ve had the naked dream way too many times. I’ve had the teeth falling out dream way too many times,” he shared. “So it was just really drawing from our own personal experiences and then collecting those experiences from the whole crew and then finding the ones that fit the best in the story and putting them on screen.”

“It was definitely intentional,” Alex pointed out about avoiding an overly polished look. “Especially when you’re making a CG animated film, the goal is to make everything look imperfect because the minute it looks perfect, it looks fake. It looks CG. I had this really nice dovetail into the thematic of the film.”

“The whole thing was a challenge,” Alex pointed out. “Anytime you’re doing a CG animated feature, everything’s really challenging. Especially when you’re trying to operate at the highest level. We were trying to make this movie look as good as a Disney or a Pixar movie.”

“And I think that the team at Sony also does an incredible job. The biggest challenge was probably the scope of the film, because it’s a dream world, so we go to so many dream worlds.”

“And anytime you have scope, it becomes very expensive, and you have a lot to do. You have to build an entire new set every time you’re going to a new dream world.”

In ‘In Your Dreams,’ if the siblings can withstand a snarky stuffed giraffe, zombie breakfast foods, and the queen of nightmares, the Sandman will grant them their ultimate dream of a perfect family.

Tim cited another challenge in making In Your Dreams. “The only other thing that comes to my mind is the COVID-19 pandemic. But so many people worked through that.”

“Yeah, we did this movie almost entirely remotely,” Alex stressed. “We started production in January of 2020. COVID hit in March. A shelter-in-place order went into effect. I went back to Hong Kong because I thought the world was going to end, so I was like, oh, I should see my parents before that happens (laughs). So, I moved to Hong Kong.”

“I spent 18 months there, working on the film remotely,” the writer-director said about Hong Kong, where he lived as a teenager and studied at the Chinese International School. “And the time difference was 15 hours ahead, so I would work from midnight to like 10 am every day. I would sleep during the day, and then wake up.”

“I did that for a year and a half. So, that was incredibly challenging. But that had nothing to do with the film. Those were just the circumstances that we were in.”

“And it was a challenge that we turned into an opportunity,” Tim added. “You get to really expand who you’re working with in this remote way. It was cool.”

Asked if AI was used in the animation, Alex was succinct. “It’s sort of an anticlimactic answer, but we didn’t use any AI in this movie because AI has really only been around commercially, maybe the last year. We were pretty much done with the movie by that time.”

“And even if it was available, I don’t think I would use it. Because there’s just something about the aesthetic that I don’t like, and obviously, the process is not very human. The whole point of making art is to bring the human side and the human soul into the work. And I feel like AI just can’t do that.”

A surprise in the film’s soundtrack is that Simu and Cristin composed a duet, “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” which they sing.

“Simu and Cristin actually sing it,” Alex confirmed.  “I don’t know if you know, but Cristin is an incredible singer. Simu is actually also very good. So, we’re excited for the world to hear his performance.”

As for the rest of the songs used in the movie, Alex said, “We were really lucky. We got a lot of support from Netflix. So, there wasn’t any song that I wanted that we couldn’t get. Obviously, the Eurythmics song (“Sweet Dreams are Made of This”) was the first on my list. It’s a lot of stuff from the late ’80s and ’90s, and early 2000s.”

Alex also presided over a drawing tutorial where journalists laughed their way through their sketches of Baloney Tony, a visual effects presentation with VFX supervisor Nicola Lavender and production designer Steve Pilcher, a voice recording session with journos attempting their best vocal impression of Baloney Tony, and a French Toast cooking class (the film features as Breakfast Town) with actors Jolie Hoang-Rappaport and Elias Janssen, and a chef. – Rappler.com