Stranger Things : Tales From '85' creators reveal animated secrets

Kyle Lambert's iconic Stranger Things poster art — that retro, painted-light aesthetic — became the creative compass for the entire animated series. "If we can bring those posters to life in animation form, we've got ourselves a pretty cool series," said Eric Robles, the showrunner behind Stranger Things : Tales From '85. Season 1 landed on Netflix in April 2026, and we tracked its arrival with the same attention we give every major streaming drop. What we didn't expect was how much craft was packed into its making.

A lost chapter set between two seasons

Stranger Things : Tales From '85 takes place between seasons two and three of the flagship live-action series. Think of it as a hidden chapter — the kind of side story that expands a universe without breaking its spine. Technically, the Upside Down's gate is supposed to be closed during this period, which raised an immediate creative problem : how do you set a story in Hawkins, Indiana, with all its supernatural chaos, without contradicting the Duffer Brothers' established timeline ?

Eric Robles — who previously created Glitch Techs for Netflix and worked on The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy — solved that puzzle. He won't give away exactly how, but the solution was precise enough to earn the full support of the original show's creators. Paul Dichter, a writer on the flagship series, served as a consultant during early development to ensure the new narrative stayed within the established rules of the universe. Later, Caitlin Schneiderhan joined as head writer. "There's a lot of math to it," Robles explained. "All the pieces need to make sense. We didn't want to just do something and say 'who cares, it's cool monsters.'"

That rigor matters. The Duffer Brothers' names are on this project, and both Robles and co-executive producer Ian Graham — Senior Vice President of Creative at Flying Bark Productions LA, one of Australia's largest animation studios — treated that responsibility seriously. Getting the lore right wasn't optional.

The team behind the animation : casting for storytelling

Robles and Graham first worked together on Glitch Techs, and that collaboration built something rare in animation : a shared creative language. When the Tales From '85 project came together, the instinct was simple — reassemble the best people from that previous run.

Graham's approach to building a creative team reads almost like casting a film. He's spent over 30 years in animation, including as a storyboard artist and director on Avatar : The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. Those experiences gave him a deep network of high-level talent to draw from. Here's how the core team came together :

• Sarah Partington — brought in as supervising director for season one, praised by Robles as "an amazing storyteller in every aspect"
• Ben Choi — returned to help lay the visual and structural foundation of the series
• Ian Graham — personally hands-on in vetting and presenting talent to Robles, treating the process like casting for a film

"You don't want three people on a team that are all identical," Graham said. "You want each one to bring a specifically unique voice." That philosophy shaped the texture of the entire series — varied, layered, and visually ambitious. Just as Jujutsu Kaisen season 2 arriving on Netflix showed that animation can carry genuinely cinematic weight, Tales From '85 makes the same argument in a completely different register.

Filmmaking choices : cameras, music, and Black Sabbath

One of the most striking creative decisions in the series involves how the camera moves. Robles is explicit about it : the camera has a voice of its own. In animation, you're not constrained by physical rigs or budgetary limits on crane shots. The team used that freedom deliberately — pulling wide to emphasize isolation, pushing in tight for emotional weight, never defaulting to a flat head-to-head dialogue setup.

The pumpkin patch action sequence became a showcase for all these influences — and for one very specific music choice. Graham spent weekends digging through tracks, leaning on his own 1980s upbringing. Early Black Sabbath landed immediately. "Nothing could possibly sell horror more," he said. The track chosen was Children of the Grave — a title Robles noted was almost too fitting given the context.

Music, Graham insists, is the soul of filmmaking. The wrong song can kill a great sequence. The right one transforms it. That conviction drove every music decision across the series, not just the standout moments.

Why animation — and what it unlocks

The question Graham says they kept returning to during production : why animation at all ? It's not rhetorical — it needed a real answer baked into both the writing and the visuals. The answer they landed on is practical and creative at once. Animation allows the show to explore what the live-action flagship physically cannot, at a fraction of the cost of equivalent VFX work.

More than budget, though, it's about possibility. Animation gave the team permission to be bolder — stranger lighting, more extreme camera angles, a visual style rooted in that Kyle Lambert poster energy. The writer's room, Graham adds, was where both he and Robles felt most like themselves : "It reminds you of being a kid and being creative. There are no boundaries in that moment." For a series tracking the monsters and mysteries of Hawkins, Indiana, that sense of play isn't a luxury. It's the whole point.