‘Dream Productions’ Review: Disney+’s ‘Inside Out’ Spinoff

If the original Inside Out was preparing children for the world of adult emotional complexity, Disney+’s Dream Productions is designed to prepare children for the world of grown-up entertainment clichés.

Basically HBO’s The Franchise for kids, the animated series is a flatly innocuous spinoff, wedged pointlessly between the two Inside Out films in a way that adds almost nothing to that Pixar universe, but doesn’t take anything away either. It isn’t bad, just bland, forgettable and oddly lacking in the psychological insight that made the first movie so great and helped the second movie eventually succeed on a sentimental level.

Created by Mike Jones (Soul, Luca), the show is set at the dream-producing studio introduced in the first movie. The studio, in case you’ve forgotten, is a Hollywood backlot in our brain, filled with colorful Minion-like blobs/artisans who collaborate on cinematic nighttime visions that help people work through unprocessed memories, traumas and aspirations.

Paula Pell voices Paula Persimmon, acclaimed dream director for Riley (Kensington Tallman). The latter is presented here as a 12-year-old — roughly a year younger before the Riley of the second movie, who’s basically a different person, but not for any reason depicted in Dream Productions. It’s very strange that this was crafted as an “interquel,” yet does not answer any questions related to the two texts it exists between.

Sure, it’s convenient that you can watch Dream Productions without having seen either Inside Out or Inside Out 2, but it’s really, really unconnected. Yes, Amy Poehler‘s Joy and a few of her colleagues from Headquarters make fleeting appearances, but they contribute so little to the plot that any time a personified emotion made a cameo, I involuntarily yelled, “Go away! This isn’t your story!” at my TV.

This is Paula’s story, and she isn’t all that interesting. The hook is that Paula used to be the best of Riley’s dream directors, spinning whimsical yarns that captivated the girl when she was two or three. Dreams like Farewell My Paci, which allowed Riley to detach from her beloved pacifier, were such big hits that Paula has been able to coast for a decade.

But now, as Riley approaches puberty, Dream Productions studio chief Jean Dewberry (Maya Rudolph) has finally reached the point of “What have you done for me lately?” The problem: Paula doesn’t understand much about the person that Riley has become, and her reliance on childhood and childish icons like Riley’s Mermaid Unicorn toy have left Paula and her dreams on the verge of irrelevance.

Another issue is that Paula’s longtime assistant director Janelle (Ally Maki) — who is probably the series’ second lead, but has no personality beyond “Paula’s longtime assistant director” — is ready to go off on her own as a director. This leaves Paula stuck with insufferably artsy Xeni (Richard Ayoade), who has only ever worked as a daydream director, but is Jean’s nephew or something.

The race is on to see which dream director will be able to help Riley cope with her neuroses about an upcoming school dance, as well as associated concerns like “What dress should I wear?” and “Since the second movie convinced everybody that Riley might be gay, how much time can we spend on Riley’s crushes on imaginary boys so that her boring heteronormativity can be safely reaffirmed?”

There are a variety of potential approaches when you’re doing a TV spinoff that isn’t exactly a spinoff but that you want to be sure to associate with some very popular IP. Two easy ones are to make a show that mirrors the arc of the original IP over the season, or to make a show in which each individual chapter mirrors the arc of the original IP in a very condensed space.

An example of the latter would be James Gunn’s Creature Commandos, in which each installment is meant to play off the “disreputable character who isn’t such a freak if you understood their traumatic backstory” structure that Gunn used in Guardians of the Galaxy and The Suicide Squad. Each episode, then, is overstuffed with both chaos and melodrama, with very mixed results.

Jones goes the other way. Dream Productions is an 80-minute movie stretched across four parts like: Silly Episode, Silly Episode, Silly Episode, Unearned Attempt to Bring It All Together Emotionally Episode.

The series opens with three straight chapters in which there’s almost no effort at even limited feeling. Part of that, obviously, is an attempt to distinguish itself from Inside Out. But as differentiation strategies go, “It’s like Inside Out, only you won’t care about anybody or anything” sounds heavily flawed to me. Paula is not really a character. She has a dog named Melatonin who puts people to sleep and that’s going to engender a wee bit of sympathy right there, but I have a hard time imagining anybody rooting for Paula to succeed nor caring particularly if Riley does or doesn’t go to this dance.

Instead, Dream Productions offers young viewers two of their favorite things: mockumentary aesthetics (kids love the tweaking of a genre that means nothing to them) and third-tier inside baseball behind-the-scenes Hollywood stuff (kids love winking references to how lazy Teamsters are).

Jokes like characters reading the trade papers Sleepy and The Rileywood Reporter hit the sweet spot of being meaningless to anybody under five (seven-year-olds and above love The Hollywood Reporter) and not rising to a very high pun-based standard for more in-the-know viewers. I suspect that’s going to be true for almost all of the industry “satire.” Peak Pixar — and Inside Out is Peak Pixar — hits a perfect intersection of adorable animation and broad gags for kids, and boundary-pushing ambitious animation and smart dialogue for grownups. This just can’t reach most of those levels.

Dream Productions is unquestionably cute, though there’s a sameness to the backstage blob characters. Occasional zaniness ensues, but what it has to do with the choice to format the series as a mockumentary is beyond me. The talking head segments and tricks of jittery perspective that make the style work in The Office are inconsistently applied.

Mostly, it feels like they chose to do the series as a mockumentary because mockumentaries are intimate. That somewhat, I suppose, excuses that there’s no scope to any of it, none of that eye-opening wonderment that both Inside Out movies delivered through complex concepts visualized in astonishing ways. What those movies do, in the short term if not the long, is recontextualize things we think we understand — the construction of the “self,” the compartmentalizing of emotions or even the production of dreams — in a new way that’s colorful, vibrant and immediate.

Whether Dream Productions is exploring dreams, nightmares or daydreams, I never came away reflecting on how what was on the screen related to my own dreaming process — much less thinking of more provocative questions about the lack of intersection between Feelings and Dreams, since Joy and company are, as I already said, present only as sporadic interlopers.

Those cameos come from the original voices from the movies, but the parts are so sparse it could almost be anybody. This is also probably the least taxed Pell and especially Rudolph have ever been by a vocal assignment. Of the new cast additions, only Ayoade is doing anything funny, but Xeni’s pretentious banter could have used a writerly punch-up from somebody like Richard Ayoade.

At only four episodes, each under 20 minutes before credits, Dream Productions is far too short and light on its feet to be deeply disappointing. To be deeply disappointing, it would need depth. File this in the Pixar cabinet of faint praise under, “It’s fine.”