Review: Dream Productions (Disney+)

By John Corrado

Dream Productions, the new Disney Plus limited series “from the world of Inside Out,” presents somewhat of a departure for Pixar. It’s not only their first stab at episodic storytelling, but also done in the style of a mockumentary.

The four-part series is presented as a “behind the scenes” look at Dream Productions, the bustling movie studio inside Riley’s mind where her dreams are produced. And it’s delightful, working as a mix of backstage studio comedy and Hollywood satire.

Set in between the events of the two movies, Dream Productions serves as a sort of midquel (an “inbetweenquel” is how the studio is branding it) to Inside Out and this year’s blockbuster sequel Inside Out 2. It focuses on Riley (voiced by Kensington Tallman) at twelve, before Anxiety and her cohort of new emotions showed up.

The series mainly follows Paula Persimmon (Paula Pell), the seasoned dream director who is tasked with crafting dreams based on Riley’s memories. As emotion Joy (Amy Poehler) tells us, memories that “need some extra processing” are sent down to Dream Productions for inspiration. Paula is the director behind beloved childhood dreams like Farewell My Paci (a dream that, in Joy’s words, actually “changed the world” by getting Riley to finally ditch her pacifier).

Paula is desperate to craft the next “clockbuster” (i.e., a dream that makes you sleep through the alarm clock), with studio head Jean Dewberry (Maya Rudolph) breathing down her neck waiting for a hit. But Riley is growing up and Paula is losing her touch, with her candy-coloured productions starring Rainbow Unicorn (a fan favourite from the first movie who is as sassy as ever here) and a cohort of dancing cupcakes no longer cutting it for a maturing preteen imagination.

Paula’s assistant director Janelle (Ally Maki) gets promoted, while Paula is paired up with hipster Xeni (Richard Ayoade), the avant-garde daydream director who balks at using a script and likes to improvise with his camera. The story’s through-line is about helping Riley process her mixed feeling over going to a school dance; the original emotions are featured mainly in cutaways back to Headquarters as they react to the dreams.

There are some cute moments with Joy and Sadness (Phyllis Smith) watching the dreams like movies from headquarters. But the focus is mainly kept on the Dream Productions crew. The series is written and created by Mike Jones, a co-writer on Soul and Luca, who infuses it with a lot of clever little jokes and callbacks to the first movie (Riley’s imaginary Canadian boyfriend makes quite the appearance). It very much functions as a spinoff that takes us deeper into this world, with the episodic structure letting them branch off and explore different aspects of Riley’s mind and how it operates.

It’s fast-paced (the four episodes together can be watched in about ninety minutes total) and often very funny. There are many clever touches throughout, with a lot of imaginative elements to it about how dreams work and how they incorporate different elements from Riley’s own life. The bright and colourful animation is filled with playful little details, like the parody movie posters that we see in the background for different genres of dreams.

The “reality TV” approach, with the characters directly addressing the camera as if being followed around and interviewed by a film crew, is also new for Pixar. If Dream Productions doesn’t deliver the same emotional gut-punches as the two movies, it still has its share of heartfelt moments, as we see how much Paula and the other jellybean-shaped mind workers all care for Riley in their own ways. It builds to a surprisingly sweet finale that raises the emotional stakes, and does have a certain poignancy to it; this is still, at heart, another story about Riley getting older and the new feelings that come with it.

The series was developed by the studio at the same time as Inside Out 2. What nobody could have predicted is that Inside Out 2 would become the highest grossing movie of the year, naturally increasing the demand for more stories set in this world. In this way, the series is able to work in tandem with the two movies (which, full disclosure, I count as personal favourites of mine), while also feeling like its own thing. For Inside Out fans, Dream Productions is an incredibly fun treat to watch.