Review: 'In Your Dreams' is a frustratingly adequate animated adventure, with no highs or lows to break it out of the middle ground.

There’s nothing drastically wrong with the animated fantasy “In Your Dreams,” but there’s nothing spectacularly right about it, either — it just sort of exists, inoffensively frittering away 90 minutes without leaving much behind in the viewer’s mind or soul.

Stevie (voiced by Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) is a slightly overachieving middle-schooler in Minnesota, who keeps her room tidy and gets upset if she doesn’t have straight A’s. Her biggest problem, she thinks, is sharing her bedroom and live with her younger brother, Elliott (voiced by Elias Janssen), who delights in magic tricks and getting in Stevie’s hair. 

As the story unfolds, though, Stevie is having some adult-sized anxieties — mostly from hearing her parents (voiced by Cristin Milioti and Simu Liu) arguing. The main topics of the arguments are money, Dad’s insistence on pursuing his music career and the possibility that Mom will get a teaching job in Duluth, a place Dad doesn’t want to live.

After visiting a bookstore, Elliott comes away with a dusty old volume, with the title “The Legend of the Sandman.” Stevie thinks nothing of it, until that night when she sees Elliott in his bed, which now moves like a bucking bronco. Of course, it’s a dream — and somehow the book is letting Stevie and Ellott live each other’s dreams.

This gives Stevie an idea: That if she can get to the Sandman, she can wish for everything in her life to be the way it was. Of course, anyone who’s ever watched a “Twilight Zone” episode or heard stories about a monkey’s paw knows that with wishes, specificity is very important.

In the land of dreams, Elliott is reunited with his long-missing stuffed animal, Baloney Tony (voiced by Craig Robinson) — a giraffe-like plush who shares with Stevie a mutual dislike for the other. They also see Nightmare (voiced by Gia Carides), the creator of nightmares, and the one thing keeping the kids away from the Sandman (voiced by Omid Djalili).

Director Alex Woo and co-writer Erik Benson, both Pixar alumni, have some clever visual ideas bouncing around this movie. The best is the M.C. Escher-like architecture of the Sandman’s inner sanctum, where the movie’s eye-twisting conclusion happens. 

Getting to that point, though, requires Stevie to learn some important lessons — about being able to accept change as it comes, and to appreciate the annoying little brother in your life — that are underlined a little too obviously, even in a movie aimed at children.

If there’s a word that best describes “In Your Dreams,” I think it would be “serviceable.” It’s an adequate animated entertainment, that gets the job done. But it’s nothing you or your kids will remember once the credits roll.

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‘In Your Dreams’

★★1/2

Starts streaming Friday, November 14, on Netflix. Rated PG for thematic content, scary images, action/peril and some rude humor. Running time: 90 minutes.