The thing about dreams is that there are almost always multiple ways to interpret them—which makes it somehow appropriate that there’s a variety of different ways to think about Dream Productions, the new Disney+ spinoff of the Inside Out franchise. It’s a perfectly enjoyable story with enough fun details to keep it satisfying. At the same time, it doesn’t feel like it adds a lot to the world in which it exists. And then there’s the Hollywood satire, which doesn’t seem fully aware that it’s kind of satirizing itself.
Although it’s broken into four episodes like a series, Dream Productions really tells a single story that easily could have been an 80-minute feature. Structured like a behind-the-scenes documentary, it mostly follows Paula Persimmon (voiced by Paula Pell), a veteran director of dreams for our Inside Out protagonist Riley (Kenstington Tallman). Paula is good-natured but kind of oblivious, unable to recognize that her longtime assistant director Janelle (Ally Maki) has ambitions of her own, or that the sensibility that has informed her idea of Riley’s dreams hasn’t grown with the now-tweenager. And that could mean falling out of favor with the studio boss (Maya Rudolph), or potentially getting replaced by the boss’s artsy nephew (Richard Ayoade).
While the familiar faces of Joy, Sadness and Anger make cameo appearances—a choice that
feels somewhat obligatory, and doesn’t really fit in with the premise—the story stays mostly focused on Paula’s journey of figuring out how she needs to grow creatively. Pell’s voice performance proves extremely effective in this role, capturing a boisterousness that remains sympathetic even when we see her steamrolling everyone around her out of an unexamined conviction that she still knows what’s best for Riley. Along the way, we get a bunch of enjoyable background gags that will make Dream Productions stand up to freeze-framing and re-watching; it’s a great touch that the “studio commissary” includes dessert options like “REM Brulee” and “Trypto-flan,” or that the movie poster promoting the “Canadian boyfriend” of Riley’s dreams bears the title Aboot a Boy.
It feels a little hard to ignore, though, that this is a story about needing to shake off an attachment to past successes in order to find something relevant to the current moment, and that this story is coming in the form of another Disney franchise extension. It’s an effective touch that the dream studio has experts in individual genres—one for action, one for sports, one for nightmares, and so forth—yet is also feels like an acknowledgement that there’s little room within a system for something that doesn’t fit neatly within one of those familiar genres.
What we have here is basically a sequel that’s criticizing the inability to think beyond sequels. There’s also a sense that even within the Inside Out universe, this particular thematic idea feels overly familiar. This year’s Inside Out 2 managed to earn its existence by finding a new angle on dealing with emotions, but Dream Productions turns into a replay of the original movie, in which Joy’s inability to recognize the shifting landscape of an adolescent mind drove the conflict. Paula Persimmon basically steps into Joy’s shoes in that respect, and the result is something that’s honest about parents needing to let go of their own idea of who their kids are, but also a little redundant.
There’s enough of the Pixar visual imagination on display in Dream Productions that it’s hardly a waste of time, especially as it digs deep to find analogs between the subconscious and the world of filmmaking. It’s just a little disappointing when we know what the Pixar creative team can do when they truly aim to be original. You can enjoy what this story has to offer, while still wishing that they could keep dreaming bigger.
