Inside ‘Dream Productions,’ Pixar’s Ambitious Streaming Series Spinoff of the Year’s Biggest Movie

“Dream Productions” is open for business.

The four-episode Disney+ limited series is the very first long-form streaming show from Pixar, the vaulted animation studio behind “Toy Story,” “WALL•E” and “Turning Red,” among others. And what’s more – it serves as a spinoff of the year’s highest-grossing movie, “Inside Out 2.” (Among other things, it is also the highest grossing animated film of all time.)

And it all started with a loose Zoom conversation.

Mike Jones, who would go on to write and create “Dream Productions,” was on with Pete Docter, Pixar’s chief creative officer and the director of the original “Inside Out,” which anthropomorphized the emotions inside a young girl’s head. They were going through different ideas. In the last few years, Jones has become one of the most trusted voices at Pixar, having co-written the screenplays for “Luca” and Docter’s Oscar-winning “Soul” and serving on the studio’s storied brain trust. Once the idea of “Dream Productions,” a spinoff centered around the studio that produces Riley’s dreams, came out, Docter introduced the idea of presenting it as a Christopher Guest-style mockumentary.

“He goes, ‘What if it’s like a workplace comedy inside the studio that is making all of these movies for one audience member and what does that look like?’” Jones remembered. Jones went away and wrote out a treatment, asking questions like, What does box office mean to Dream Productions? “We came up with the idea that if Riley remembers the dream and tells somebody about it the next day, that’s huge. That’s a big international hit,” Jones said.

Quickly the story coalesced around Paula Persimmon (voiced by legendary “Saturday Night Live” writer Paula Pell), a director at Dream Productions who is trying to maintain relevancy. She is getting pressured by the head of the studio (Maya Rudolph) to make hipper dreams and is paired with an edgier daydream director named Xeni (Richard Ayoade).

Original animated series aren’t new to Disney+, but they are to Pixar. The studio is known for not rushing films out before they’re ready, which is how it earned its reputation as one of the most reliable animation studios in town. Pixar churned out hit after hit until Disney’s push to streaming resulted in box office disappointments for 2022’s “Lightyear” and 2023’s “Elemental.” So the mega-hit status of “Inside Out 2” couldn’t have come at a better time — it grossed $1.7 billion worldwide — and “Dream Productions” aims to ride that wave of enthusiasm on streaming. Up until now, Pixar had produced series of interconnected shorts for the streamer (things like “Forky Asks a Question,” “Dug Days” and “Cars on the Road”). Now they’re dreaming bigger.

A movie and a show all at once

As for the actual production of the series, “Inside Out 2” and “Dream Productions” were being made concurrently. “This is the closest we’ve ever gotten to doing a Marvel Universe, where we have two [going at once]. Usually we just have the one project,” said “Inside Out 2” director Kelsey Mann. The two teams would check in on each other to make sure that they weren’t stepping on similar ground. And they would even share elements.

Jones said that “Dream Productions” had built a sequence around a brainstorm – they had done some artwork and previsualizations for it before realizing that it “just didn’t work with us, story-wise,” so it moved over to the “Inside Out” sequel. “Kelsey and Mark [Neilsen, producer] saw it and thought it was great and they had a space that they could fit it right in,” Jones said. They would share assets too – “Dream Productions” “made a lot of the mind workers,” said Mann. And “Inside Out 2” shared the emotions with “Dream Productions.” “We’re able to leverage off of each other,” said Mann. “It was just really great, because everybody is so connected to the hip,” Jones said.

In terms of this being Pixar’s first streaming series, there is actually a series that was finished first, “Win or Lose,” that will now hit Disney+ in February 2025. With the oversized success of “Inside Out 2,” Disney made the decision to pump up “Dream Productions,” and it’ll pave the way for “Win or Lose” which follows a co-ed softball team through the week leading up to their big game.

According to Jones, making a streaming series versus making a movie at the animation studio necessitates more creativity in terms of how they iterate. They also had less time to iterate, which led to a system where he and Simon would “screen the show in any way it was available to the brain trust as often as we could,” getting feedback from Pixar’s lauded group of creative head honchos.

Sometimes this meant showing reels without being entirely sure how they would fit together. “What we found is that approach really involved Pete in the process, as a filmmaker. Pete is involved in every single movie at Pixar as a filmmaker but we would bring him into the edit room,” Jones said. It would often be Docter, Jonas Rivera (who is the executive vice president for film production) and the “Dream Productions” team. They would show incomplete sequences and rough storyboards, explaining how one scene could connect to the other. “We love doing that, because Pete could lean in and get his hands into the edit a little bit more and suggest things and that’s exactly what you want,” Jones said.

The special thanks for “Dream Productions” features a murderers row of Pixar titans, like “Up” co-director Bob Peterson, “Lightyear” director Angus Maclane and many more, which speaks to the all-hands-on-deck approach of Pixar.

Taking inspiration from documentary filmmaking

Jones drew on his experiences as a screenwriter before landing at Pixar for “Dream Productions.” “I would go after these jobs and if the movie wasn’t made, I would quickly kind of try to get something else going, like write a new spec, or a new original that would maybe get noticed again and then get me some more work,” Jones said. “This ebb and flow of Hollywood where there is the sense you’re only as good as your last hit, but you really need to put on a good face. That feeds a lot like Paula.”

Before becoming a filmmaker, Jones worked at Filmmaker Magazine and came up in the ‘90s independent film movement, which served as inspiration for Xeni’s free spiritedness. “He’s the part of me that scoffed at four-quadrant stuff,” Jones said. Paula is more appreciative of the mainstream, as Jones is now. “I wanted to put those two mindsets together. It’s like the old me and the new me and how they push each other towards that final episode.” The finale, it must be said, is a doozy.

The documentary aesthetic was something that was hugely important for the team. They looked at the work of legendary documentary filmmakers like D.A. Pennebaker and Albert and David Maysles, and their “direct cinema” approach which sought to capture subjects as directly as possible with handheld cameras.

“I felt like some of the appeal is that you’re not on somebody and they’re reacting, it’s like they’ve already reacted and then you swish pan to them and they’re in the middle of the reaction. There’s something that feels so immediate and real about that,” Jones said. “We had to challenge ourselves not to follow the action so much,” Jones said. Something that would have been so natural in live-action became a source of consternation in animation.

Austin Madison, one of the directors of “Dream Productions,” said, “Suddenly, the animators had a camera that the characters were aware of, which we haven’t done.” They had to ask questions, said Madison, like: “When does the character look at the camera? When does the character want to hide from the camera? It was a challenge, but it really was one that everybody was happy to step up for.”

Riley’s Crew

Other key feedback was a group of teenage girls who advised both “Inside Out 2” and “Dream Productions.” They were dubbed Riley’s Crew, and they gave some surprising insight. Jones was worried about the show being too “inside baseball.” “But it’s inside Hollywood baseball. It’s not inside like a ball bearing factory,” Jones said. After they showed it to Riley’s Crew, Jones asked: “Were you confused? Were you bored? Did you like all the inside Hollywood stuff?” To his shock, “They loved it. They wanted more Hollywood stuff, more behind-the-scenes stuff. And because of that we were able to go back and say, ‘Hey, look, they loved it. Can we lean into it even more?’” And they did.

The team leaned on Riley’s Crew, too, for the emotional bedrock of the story. “It was so great to talk to them about the authenticity of what a girl at that age is currently going through,” said Simon. “Valerie and I were teenage girls, but it’s been a while. The authenticity of your friend group, how you interact, how they’re feeling.”

“Their notes were usually more organized than our production notes,” Madison joked.

When all was said and done, “Dream Productions” clocks in at 82 minutes. That’s longer than “Toy Story” and only 10 minutes shorter than “Monsters, Inc.” For all intents and purposes, “Dream Productions” is a new Pixar feature film, one with a wholly unique style and sensibility. Jones said that he thought of the series as a feature too. “It’s structured like a feature,” said Jones. The same questions drove him: “Who is the character in the beginning of this movie and how much do they change, to be able to do something in the end that they couldn’t do in the beginning?”

Talking to the team behind “Dream Productions,” you get the sense that they asked the same questions of themselves to bring the ambitious series to life.

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