Riding the coattails of the biggest animated film ever (Inside Out 2, $1.7 billion and counting) is no mean feat. And Dream Productions, a four-episode narrative series of 20-minute-ish episodes, feels like one of Pixar’s most ambitious small-screen efforts yet. Their TV spin-offs tend to be tiny animated snacks, often no more than 5 minutes at a time; this feels like a full meal, with a runtime that adds up to a full movie. Set between the two _Inside Out_films, you could almost think of it as Inside Out 2.5.
Happily, it’s also an absolute treat, expanding the psychologically rich and comedically fertile setting of a pre-teen’s brain in deeply satisfying ways. Dreams as a concept have already been briefly explored in the two Inside Out films, beginning with Pete Docter’s superlative 2015 smash and continued with Kelsey Mann’s solid sequel: a means of delving into unprocessed memories, the dreams themselves staged as if giant movie productions, filmed with cameras fitted with a “reality distortion filter”.
From the zippy ‘60s-inspired opening titles, the show follows the same tone that made the first two films among Pixar’s best work: witty, bright and gorgeously animated.
This series swings by the familiar emotional faces of Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith) et al, but the focus here is on the Hollywood studio-esque Dream Productions itself, led by the fearsome executive Jean Dewberry (Maya Rudolph, always giving 110%). It is a fun metaphor for filmmaking itself: an entire creative industry in which the directors, producers and screenwriters have an audience of one. They are trying to come up with dreams that their 12-year-old master Riley (Kensington Tallman) will find impactful and satisfying — attempting, like Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception, to implant ideas in this young girl’s head, to steer her life in positive ways.
If that all seems highfalutin, it really is not. From the zippy ‘60s-inspired opening titles, the show follows the same tone that made the first two films among Pixar’s best work: witty, bright and gorgeously animated. It plays out like an Office-style behind-the-scenes mockumentary, with fading director Paula Persimmon (Paula Pell) — who made a brief appearance in the first film — offering David Brent-esque winks-to-cameras. And as you might expect from Pixar, there are neat visual gags for those who care to look (the reading material of choice among dream workers includes ‘The Rileywood Reporter’ and ‘Snoozeweek’).
With puberty looming for Riley, Paula’s status is quickly threatened in the dream world, first by her long-suffering assistant director Janelle (Ally Maki), and then by snooty daydream director (Richard Ayoade, who hilariously seems to be playing an exact replica of his character from Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir). Xeni’s repertoire includes such pretentious fare as ‘Does That Cloud Look Like A Hockey Puck?’ and he is prone to labelling his rivals as “bourgeois”. Riley’s burgeoning maturity, it seems, is proving an existential question for Dream Productions.
As ever, the series takes time to expand the worldbuilding with joyous conceptual jokes that only adults will understand — Paula has a dog named Melatonin who sends to sleep anyone unwise enough to pet him — and introduces concepts such as sleepwalking with a giddy sense of uncontrolled chaos. The story itself is, admittedly, not as emotional or as profound as the films; by design, this is a lighter toe-dip into this world. But it is just as funny and weird. When one anonymous dream worker is given dialogue like “It’s gonna be a long night — so I’m wearing a diaper”, you know you’re in safe, silly hands.