Netflix juggernauts Black Mirror and BoJack Horseman once had precious little in common. Now, though, the creative forces who catapulted those shows to dizzying heights are uniting for an interactive cartoon reminiscent of the works of Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and other animation pioneers. Enter Cat Burglar, a clever interactive experience boasting over an hour of animation to unlock and explore. The premise is simple: the thieving Rowdy Cat must break into a museum and steal a priceless treasure. The only thing standing between the cat burglar and his score is the museum security dog, Peanut.
The show takes an average of 15 minutes to complete, but because the gags and outcomes are randomized, there's appeal in going back for a third, fourth, or even fifth playthrough. The only static aspect of Cat Burglar is you. Your answers dictate Rowdy Cat's luck, but fate, smarts, and a dastardly algorithm all briefly convene to determine if the Cat Burglar swipes his prize or bites the dust. The show's slapstick humor is as welcome here as it was in Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry. With help from Black Mirror mastermind Charlie Brooker and BoJack Horseman supervising director Mike Hollingsworth, Cat Burglar grounds itself in the thoroughly ungrounded elements of its medium, reveling in its joyous abandon and inviting audiences to join the fun.
Collider recently caught up with Brooker and Hollingsworth about Cat Burglar, discussing everything from the show's origins to the immortal appeal of Golden Age cartoons.
Can you walk me through how Cat Burglar came about?
CHARLIE BROOKER: I met Mike at some glamorous Emmy event. I remember that you struck me as a little bit of a cartoon character. It was after Bandersnatch, and I was thinking about other ways of using the interactivity of Netflix that were a little experimental and a little bit different. One of the things I was thinking about was a game of skill in some way, and you're directing the character's luck. I've always been a huge fan of those classic cartoons, Tex Avery cartoons in particular. They had a sort of brutal anarchy to them that really appealed to me. And it turned out that Mike is way more obsessive than I am about them too.
MIKE HOLLINGSWORTH: Yeah, I've got stacks of books over here. All I do is take in classic cartoon information.
Cat Burglar is a really cool way of revisiting old cartoons and looking ahead at new avenues for the medium. What were some of the challenges of making an interactive cartoon?
HOLLINGSWORTH: I think Charlie and I both know how to make these gags, but hanging these gags on the bones of an interactive thing was tough. Those Tex Avery cartoons were really just amazing list jokes, but we needed to keep moving through these levels. Charlie already went through this on Bandersnatch, and when we would be like, “We discovered this about the process just last week,” he would be very Buddha-like and say, “Yes.” It was like being in an interactive thing in real life while making an interactive thing. It was like dominoes in the sense that it all needed to set up the next thing.
BROOKER: And also, it randomizes it. So no two viewers are going to have the same experience. It's modular in that way, but it all shuffles around. And another challenge was that we were working on it during the pandemic. We couldn't all be in the same room.
Do you find that it's more difficult to collaborate over Zoom or do you feel that your creative chemistry travels that distance for you and eliminates the weirdness of remote writers' rooms?
HOLLINGSWORTH: It was such a Herculean task that we started in my backyard across the lawn. Yelling cartoon ideas across to each other. But one thing about this thing we're making about Cat Burglar is that though we made the whole thing from home, the ease of it is that these cartoons are international. Especially if you take Tom and Jerry, which is huge around the world. We were making this in LA, in London, in Israel, in Amsterdam, and in Turkey, I think. We had people everywhere and in all of these places they all understand these cartoons. These cartoons have reached such a saturation point culturally that even though people don't know Tex Avery by name, they know it when they see it.
BROOKER: They know the tone, yeah. Also, I'm a detail-obsessed person. For me, it was important that it had the feel of those old cartoons. I like the clash of old and new. So we always said we should do like a lost reel of a cartoon that no one has discovered for 40 or 50 years.
HOLLINGSWORTH: To that point, I was very excited about making it 4x3. My Netflix exec was like, “Don't be arrogant.”
So basically, you didn't want it to feel like an imitation.
HOLLINGSWORTH: Yeah, we wanted it to feel like the real thing. The whole idea, Charlie's initial idea, was that this was a lost cartoon. This cartoon was discovered from a vault and in every meeting, the question was, “Could they have done this in 1949 at MGM?” That kind of flavored every one of our decisions. They couldn't do super complicated camera work in those cartoons in 1949, but it didn't stop them from making brilliant cartoons. They didn't have that complicated camera like they had at Disney that could push in on Bambi.
Ending on a fun note: Which part of the process did you enjoy most?
HOLLINGSWORTH: Yeah, for us, it was so amazing to get to work with Charlie. I was such a huge Black Mirror fan and then I was very aware, coming from six years at BoJack, these were like two early Netflix goliath entities coming together to make this. The working title of this should have been “BlackJack HorseMirror.” It was essentially an opportunity to work with Charlie Brooker and Tex Avery.
Cat Burglar premieres February 22 on Netflix.