'In Your Dreams' director Alex Woo teaches us how to draw Baloney Tony

My name is Alex Wu. I'm the director of In Your Dreams, a new animated feature coming out on Netflix November 14th

The Sandman can make your dreams come true. It's magic! I can see your crack, Houdini

No way it worked! We're actually inside our dreams! Thank you so much for being here. It's so exciting. The movie is so wonderful

And I would love to kind of draw some of the really iconic, or going to be iconic, I should say, images, characters, and we'll say dreams and nightmares from the movie

So I want to start with this star, Baloney Tony. So tell me, where did Baloney Tony come from

Because one, it's a great name. And two, how do you design him

So the inspiration for him actually came from a combination of things

But when I was young, me and my brother, we had these two, my aunt bought us these two teddy bears that were Santa related

So they're called Santa bears. And my brother he had a bloody nose one day and he got some bloodstains on his Santa bear near the tail And so we ended up calling it Butthole Bear Okay And so that became Yes no I mean it just the idea but obviously it was his stuffed animal

and so he loved it despite how gross it was. And so that was sort of the inspiration for, yeah, Belenitoni

and this idea that, like, our stuffed animals, even though they can be gross and disgusting

They're still ours and there's something about our connection to them that despite them having

rancid meat odors, they bring us warmth and familiarity and they make us feel like we're

at home. Yeah, I noticed that there's no actual pocket for bologna in here, which I was like, I wanted

to try it at home. I wanted to try it for myself. Yeah, so can you take me, I guess, through the design as you're drawing and making Bologna

Tony, you know, what were the details that were like especially exciting

So we, I mean, Beloney Tony's a giraffe, and, you know, giraffes have really long necks. Yeah

Our giraffe has kind of a stunted neck. But it was by design

We wanted him to look like kind of one of those badly designed stuffed animals that you get

at like a state fair or in these like you know in those claw machine games They always kind of cheap Yeah so that was yeah a big sort of guiding principle for us So yeah we give him like a long stubby kind of neck

And he's got this muzzle, which is like, you know, I kind of draw it as like a circle

And he's got these big nostrils. And he's got these buck teeth

and he's only got one good eye because he's been loved so much that you know he's kind of falling

apart and then he's got these ossicones which you know giraffes have i think that's the first time

i've actually learned what they're actually called i know right i actually didn't know until we started

working on this movie um i actually don't know what the function of those things are i think

they're kind of like antlers for a deer. And then you've got his ears. And then he's got

big round belly. And he's got these kind of itty bitty stubby arms. I love how proud he

is And then he got hooves And then he got these kind of stubby little feet And and then he got this giraffe tail Were there ever any other animals that you had in mind for Bologna Tony Or were there ever any changes in the design

Because you've been working on this movie for nine years, so how did Bologna Tony evolve

He actually was always a giraffe. Yeah, and that was Eric's idea

So Eric was the co-writer and co-director of this film. Yeah, I don't know why he chose a giraffe, but it just worked

because I think we just hadn't seen an animated stuffed giraffe before

so we thought it'd be really funny. Yeah, and I love, like, the playing with the neck

with, like, the flopping back kind of thing was very fun. Well, it's just, you know, giraffes with such long necks

it kind of makes sense that, you know, it's kind of hard for them to keep their heads stable

Yeah, and I think the other reason we liked a giraffe is because they kind of look weird, right

If you think about a giraffe, they've got these really long necks and long limbs, and they're kind of lanky and they don't, they're not very graceful

They've got these really long eyelashes, they've got that really long tongue that like spits in

The blue tongue. Yeah, that's right. They're just very weird looking. So, yeah, we just thought it'd be a fun animal to depict as a stuffed animal

Let's admire Bologna Tony versus Bologna. Hey, that's pretty good. This is Bologna spelled like totally wrong

That's pretty good. Yeah