From Hawkins to NYC: ‘Stranger Things: Tales of ’85’ and ‘Kevin’ transport to animated otherworlds

Welcome again to Cartoon Corner, a semi-regular feature of this space where we review cartoons. They’ve had their ups and downs over the years, creatively, commercially, but for a long while it’s been mostly ups. Originally they were made for everyone, then seemingly for kids but interesting to adults, and eventually just for adults; they come in all flavors now. With the right people attached, they seem to be easier to greenlight than a live-action show; actors like them for not having to rise for early morning calls, or sit in makeup chairs being glued into prosthetics that an artist can just draw; and of course, they allow for varieties of strangeness difficult to render otherwise. We’re not in Bedrock anymore.

“Stranger Things: Tales from ‘85,” premiering Thursday on Netflix, shoehorns a new story between the events of the second and third season, after Eleven sealed the gate to the Upside Down and before the Russians messed everything up again. It isn’t rare for a series to fill in the blanks between seasons or extend a series post-cancellation via novels or comics or radio shows. This is most common among genre shows — the 2016 “Batman ’66 Meets the Man from U.N.C.L.E.” is right up my alley — but you can find comic books devoted to the Brady Bunch, the Monkees and “Bonanza” as well. Stories want to continue, and the fans will take whatever they can get. The “Stranger Things: Tales from Hawkins” graphic novels have previously performed that service. “Tales from ‘85” is like that, with movement, sound and acting added.

It would be, of course, impossible, if possibly amusing, to tell a “Stranger Things” tale set in this time with the original actors, and horrifying, if not immoral, to tell it with AI clones. (The salary asks would be prohibitive anyway.) There are practical advantages as well to animation: a fight with a demogorgon will cost roughly as much as a scene in a diner set around chili fries. This allows for more action and more monsters — splendidly rendered — and more occasions for Eleven to use her superpowers. And it’s set in a snowy wintertime, which would have been impractical and expensive in live action, but pays all kinds of benefits in terms of staging and mood.

Mounted by showrunner Eric Robles, it’s a streamlined, supercharged telling, stripped of the soap operatics that occupied more of the original series than you might remember. It’s a classic kids-versus-monster adventure from which adults are largely absent, which in its own way makes this a superior “Stranger Things.” There’s a plot, obviously, a mystery, capers (including a complicated heist), and naturally a lot of bike-riding, but what matters most is the overall environment, which is completely recognizable, down to the settings, product placements, period references and pop songs, but also, in its painterly representation, something new. It feels at once familiar and fresh. You can follow the story or simply luxuriate in the color design, layouts and cinematic storyboarding.

All your friends from the live-action seasons are here, plus a new character, Nikki (Odessa A’zion), bigger than the rest, with a Mohawk, army jacket and a genius for MacGyvering weapons from old appliances. (Having got a taste of trouble Hawkins-style, she quite reasonably inquires, “You guys went through all that gnarly stuff and then you just went right back to middle school?” You may have wondered this yourself.) Stylized but not to the degree they clash with the naturalistic backgrounds, the animated avatars perfectly capture the look and essence of their human models — as in the original, I am a fan of this Max Mayfield (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) — though with their big eyes and sculpted features, they can also resemble “Thunderbirds”-style marionettes. Their exaggerated expressions are in the tradition of an “acting” style born in Disney features and passed on from generation to generation of animators, but this is, after all, a cartoon.

There is plenty of creepy suspense in “Tales from ’85.” But perhaps more disturbing is “Kevin,” now on Prime Video. Created by Joe Wengert and Aubrey Plaza, it’s set in a New York City where animals and humans are coequal in speech and intelligence (as in “Bojack Horseman”), and in which the emotional relations of people and their pets might be quasi-sexualized (if not, thank goodness, actually sexual — though it might make you look at your own animal connections a little differently).

Kevin (Jason Schwartzman) is a tuxedo cat whose easy life changes when his people Dana (Plaza) and Dan (Mike Mitchell) split up. Custody of a pet is a trope that goes back at least to the 1937 Cary Grant-Irene Dunne divorce comedy “The Awful Truth,” but here, Kevin sets off on his own into the mean streets, where a living slice of pizza may drag a dead rat.

Looking for a place to sleep, he winds up at Furrever Friends, an Astoria, Queens, shelter with the aspects of a halfway house — there’s group therapy, anyway — peopled (animaled?) with a cast of losers, including Armando (John Waters), a Persian cat (and former Broadway director) with an affected manner and a long cigarette holder; Cupcake (Whoopi Goldberg), a ragged hairless cat with a liking for drugs; Judy (Aparna Nancherla), an optimistic, idiotic Scottish Fold kitten with weepy eyes; as well as a Russian rat with a habit of disguising himself as other animals, a squirrel with an acorn addiction, a harrumphing St. Bernard (I think) who misses the old days he couldn’t be old enough to remember, various insects and other animals whose names I didn’t catch.

Running Furrever Friends is Brandi (Amy Sedaris), a bossy little Shih Tzu, and her owned owner, Seth (Gil Ozeri). Stage star Patti LuPone plays a horse named Patti LuPony, involved in a long arc about a production of “Mame.” (The New York stage is apparently equine.) Episodes involve a quarantine, an Animal of the Month competition, an invasion of kittens, a pet adoption ceremony (like a wedding) in Provincetown, R.I., a heat wave, a “dating” episode (“I want to meet someone the old-fashioned way,” says Kevin, “screaming at the top of my lungs outside their window until they start feeding me”) and a Fourth of July story in which the characters take drugs to soften the noise of the fireworks — it’s a drug-taking episode.

Schwartzman’s native softness fits Kevin’s naivete very well, and recalls his work in another borough-set fairy tale of New York, “Bored to Death.” It can be visually distressing and there are perhaps too many anus-related jokes (I would have settled for one). But the dialogue is funny — “Should we take Airborne? It was designed by teachers” is among my favorite lines this year — the social satire sharp and the NYC references fun, if you know them (a scene in the Café Carlyle, nods to Brooklyn’s Union Pool, a character obviously modeled on Fran Lebowitz). And the whole business proves, happily, to have a lot of heart — broken sometimes, but that’s life, even in Toontown.

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