First-time director Alex Woo, who left Pixar as a story artist on Incredibles 2 and Finding Dory to form Kuku Studios, had a very personal childhood story to tell with In Your Dreams (Netflix, streaming November 14, following a limited theatrical run November 7). It’s about Stevie (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) and her younger brother Elliot (Elias Janssen) searching for the Sandman (Omid Djalili) in their dreams with the help of a magic book to prevent their parents from breaking up.

“Both my parents got married when they were very young,” Woo recounted, “and my mother had all these dreams and aspirations for herself, but she had to put them on hold because of parenting. And it was even harder for her as a [Chinese] immigrant woman to build a career because women didn’t have the same opportunities that they do now. And I think that’s why my parents struggled so much and that’s why they tried to shield my brother and me as much as possible.”

Looking back on his childhood in Minnesota, Woo realized that the world is imperfect and he was inspired to make an animated movie about the messiness of life. But where the film excels dramatically is through the difficult juggling act between career and parenting for both mom (Cristin Milioti) and dad (Simu Liu), which causes pain for Stevie and Elliot.And Stevie’s journey is about navigating and reconciling this revelation. The challenge was finding the universal hook for his personal story.

“I think the advantage that we had is that our movie also takes place in a very universal world, like the world of dreams,” he added. “Everybody dreams, right? Everybody across time, across culture dreams.

We still don’t know why we dream. So it’s great fodder for mythology and storytelling.”

Then came the legend of the Sandman, giving credence that he gives dreams by sprinkling sand over your eyes, which is why you wake up with crusties. “But it was still self-contained in the dream world,” continued Woo. “And so I added this element that if you could find the Sandman in the dreamworld, you could make your dreams come true. And then, suddenly, it connected the dream world with the real world. And you could finally give stakes to the film.”

Production designer Steve Picher, who had just finished Pixar’s Soul, agreed to join the project to handle the imaginative world building, which included a wild food dream and an even wilder riff on It’s a Small World with characters from a Chuck E. Cheese-like pizzeria. Then they turned to Sony Pictures Imageworks to handle the animation.

“I think Imageworks is the best animation studio in the world right now,” Woo asserted. “Spider-Verse and now with KPop Demon Hunters. They’re doing a little bit of everything and doing it so well. They delivered in every way possible. And we created so many dreamscapes. And that means a lot of new sets. And you have to do two versions of those sets because you have the dream version and the nightmare version, so the scope of the work was tremendous.”

The world of the Sandman was especially hard with with 40 layers of sand solvers. But the epic scope of the world was inspired by Denis Villeneuve’s Dune franchise. “The sandcastle, when it comes out of the ground, that was directly inspired by me trying to do a Denis Villeneuve shot in this film,” Woo said.

Meanwhile, Nightmara (Gia Carides), the Sandman’s rival, required R&D for her black, vaporous character/simulation work. “She’s like a walking, talking visual effects,” added Woo. “A lot of times she moved too quickly and the vapor would just completely envelop her face. So you’d have to restart the process and wait another 11 weeks.”

Then there was the scene-stealing, Baloney Tony (Craig Robinson), the snarky giraffe plush toy, who Elliot adores and Stevie despises. “He was based off a combination of when I was a kid and my brother and I had matching Santa bears,” explained Woo. “They were like two polar bears with Santa hats. So my brother used to occasionally have a bloody nose and there was one night where he bled on his bear and the bloodstains were around the rear end of the bear. And so I nicknamed him Butthole Bear. And it obviously drove my brother crazy. He loved it even though it was gross and disgusting and smelled awful. And I thought that was such a great metaphor for the messiness of life and he became Baloney Tony.”

But the biggest challenge was convincing Netflix to let him keep the most important sequence: Stevie confronting the harsh reality of her wish. “Not just Netflix, even our crew, thought it was too heavy,” Woo explained. “I understood where they were coming from, but I just kept telling them that this is what she needs to do as a character. She needs to go to this bad place and gain some wisdom from it. But it was a hard fought battle, convincing everyone that it was the right decision narratively, and then making sure that [Jolie’s] performance was incredibly solid and believable.”