Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column, published every Friday, spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: Inside Out spinoff Dream Productions follow the storytellers who film Riley’s dreams.
Dream Productions: Limited Series
Critics are, on occasion, guilty of reading into things a little too deeply. But, surely, it’s at least curiously coincidental that (what appears to be) one of Pixar’s final episodic series, released after a brutal set of layoffs at the Disney-owned studio in which the company consciously shifted investment away from their streaming projects, is entirely about an imaginary movie studio trying to survive under rapidly changing circumstances.
Dream Productions, which is collectively the length of a feature film yet was made for substantially less money, expands on an idea briefly visited in 2015’s Inside Out (and then revisited in this year’s Inside Out 2): the studio lot that writes, shoots, and airs the nightly dreams of Riley Andersen (Kensington Tallman). She, of course, is the human vessel guided by the collective emotions we’ve come to know and love: Joy (Amy Poehler), Disgust (Liza Lapira), Fear (Tony Hale), Anger (Lewis Black), and Sadness (Phyllis Smith).
The four-part series takes place shortly before Inside Out 2, and the arrival of Anxiety, with the emotions themselves making brief but regular appearances. It’s shot like a mockumentary, complete with to-camera asides. Mostly, the focus is on Paula Persimmon (Paula Pell), a dream director responsible for some of the biggest hits of Riley’s early years – success here isn’t measured by box office, but by how long Riley actually remembers them.
Dream Productions has significantly less psychoanalytical potential to it than its connected films, but the general idea here is that dreams are essential in helping Riley resolve problems, make tricky decisions, and move towards emotional closure. Paula’s masterwork, Farewell My Paci, resulted in little Riley finally putting aside the pacifier.
But, Riley is older now, and her unconscious mind is hungry for more than dancing unicorns and fountains of glitter. After all, that intrusive little emotion, Embarrassment, is right around the corner. And embarrassment creates an eternal fear of the “cringe”. Paula’s assistant director, Janelle (Ally Maki), has been promoted and sent off to direct her own dreams, ones she believes “really speak to the now”. So Paula, instead, has been landed with nepo baby Xeni (Richard Ayoade), as her new AD, who insists that Riley should dream about playing Go Fish with Death, because “art is meant to subvert expectations”. He’s confrontational in a way that makes you wonder if he’s a Pixarian nod to Ayoade’s director character in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir: Part II (2021).
Sure, that’s a little niche for an animated kid’s show, but with all that’s gone on behind the scenes at Pixar, it’s not so hard to imagine that Dream Productions might have transformed into a vessel for all those inside jokes and nods to life within the industry. Paula’s thrilled that she has a sandwich named after her in the commissary, she reads reviews in The Rileywood Reporter, and there’s a scene early on where Anger’s face is blurred because he never signed the release form.
It’s much more slight than usual for Pixar, and lacks that expected emotional punch. But, as a set of four 20-minute escapades that are colourful and inventive enough to keep kids entertained, and a sturdy stock of dorky visual jokes to make parents chuckle – well, maybe we can forgive creator Mike Jones and his team for wanting to let off steam and poke fun at the daily stresses, and deeper existential terror, of their chosen careers. That’s if you can swallow the bitterer pill of knowing exactly why that pressure exists.
