‘Inside Out’ Without the Engine of Ingenuity

“In Your Dreams” was made for Netflix by a team of artists who cut their teeth at Pixar (the director, Alex Woo, was a story artist on films like “Ratatouille,” “WALL-E,” and “Incredibles 2”), and it’s one of those animated movies that keeps reminding you of other animated movies (not all of them Pixar), which even if you like the films in question is not really a good thing. “In Your Dreams” is built around great swirling mounds of imagistic energy, yet it feels secondhand at its core.

Stevie (voiced by Jolie Hoang-Rappaport), a precocious 12-year-old, discovers that her parents may be breaking up. They were once a local indie music duo called Hypsonics, but Mom (Crisin Milioti) now wants to move to Duluth to become an assistant professor, while Dad (Simu Liu), a roly-poly slacker, is content to stay planted, whiling away the days diddling with the album he’ll never finish. (Given that they can’t pay the bills, there aren’t really two sides to this rift.) So how will Stevie, who shares a bedroom with her obnoxious little brother, Elliot (Elias Janssen), keep the family together?

By escaping into a world of dreams, which sounds fancifully original but translates, at heart, into a knockoff of “Inside Out,” with tween angst trying to work itself out in a lavish alternate cosmos. The way that Elliot’s stuffed giraffe, Baloney Tony, comes to life through the rapid-fire smart-mouth voicing of Craig Robinson feels like an overly pointed gloss on Eddie Murphy’s Donkey in the “Shrek” films. And the fact that Stevie and Elliott zoom around on a possessed bed frame seems to have come right out of the affectionately remembered 1971 Disney clunker “Bedknobs and Broomsticks.” Then there’s the Sandman, a kind of Wizard of Oz of the cosmic dunes voiced by the British-born Omid Djalili, who sounds like Jude Law impersonating Santa Claus.

Stevie and Elliot discover that they can be inside the same dream…