Charlie Brooker and Mike Hollingsworth talk their latest animated interactive Netflix comedy Cat Burglar. Brooker, who is best known for his work on Black Mirror, which had its own interactive streaming episode with Bandersnatch, created and executive producers Cat Burglar, with Hollingsworth serving as writer, supervising director, and executive producer. Hollingsworth previously worked on Netflix's critically acclaimed comedy BoJack Horseman. Cat Burglar allows audiences to play as Rowdy, a feline burglar attempting to break into a museum who, at every turn, runs into Peanut, a security guard dog who is hellbent on preventing theft. What follows is an interactive trivia game that, if answered wrong, sends Rowdy to many gruesome and darkly comedic deaths.
Screen Rant talked with Brooker and Hollingsworth about all things Cat Burglar, including how a project like this gets mad, what it was like creating some of the death scenes, and if Peanut and Rowdy will be returning to Netflix.
Screen Rant: After doing Bandersnatch, did creating this interactive experience come a little bit easier than the first time?
Charlie Brooker: Only in that I wasn’t writing it this time. Mike and James endured that angst. You have to think up dual outcomes to every scenario. Which sort of makes Rowdy Schrodinger’s Cat. And there’s the challenge of creating all this animation which the team have risen to and then surpassed brilliantly.
Working on something like this means you’re dealing with hundreds of separate bits of confetti – you don’t get to see it all stitched together until even later in the process than usual. That’s always a bit of a headf*ck.
This is a different beast to Bandersnatch – a bit of an experiment to see if we can do branching narrative in a different way. Rather than agonizing over choices for the character you’re answering quickfire questions to seal his fate – which means a whole raft of different technical challenges. For instance, it’s hard to get the level of difficulty right on something that isn’t inherently a gaming platform, and which has to accommodate different levels of input lag across a range of devices and so on.
In a wider sense, does something like this – an interactive tv show – feel like a natural progression in our streaming era?
Brooker: I think so. Like Bandersnatch, Cat Burglar is an experiment that wouldn’t have been possible in quite the same way just a few years ago. Hybrid creations like this will keep coming but they’ll never replace linear storytelling, just exist alongside it, as videogames already do.
Cat Burglar was so fun to me – it had this Tex Avery feel to it, but it takes it to that next level. Can you talk about how the idea for this specific interactive project came about?
Brooker: After Bandersnatch I was thinking about different ways to affect the outcome of a story, which led me to think about whether a game of skill could work – a bit like Dragon’s Lair but with rapid-fire questions, where the emphasis was on answering quickly rather than having arcane knowledge. And thinking about Dragon’s Lair led me to think about animation in general. I was thinking about how Wile E. Coyote is constantly in life-or-death situations which is sort of perfect for this kind of thing. And it was a fairly short walk from there to thinking about other classic cartoons and specifically the spirit of Tex Avery. There’s something I love about fusing the old analog feel of a late 1940s cartoon with the technology of 2022.
Mike Hollingsworth: I always imagine a scenario where, after the great success of Bandersnatch, Netflix went to Charlie and said, "Okay! What do you want to do next in this space." Then Charlie, to their great puzzlement, replied, "A lost interactive Tex Avery cartoon." Only a fellow of Charlie's immense talents could have gotten something so marvelously unique made!
There are some pretty creative death sequences depending on the choices you make – who got to come up with those and how fun was that?
Brooker: Mike and James [Bowman] clearly hate cats. Serial killers often start with animals, don’t they? Just saying.
Hollingsworth: Myself and director James Bowman took the first whack at those and Charlie, like the Roman emperor Commodus, would give a thumbs-up or down. We'd then all spit-ball a new way to squash, smash, or splatter Rowdy.
Did you guys envision this as a one-off or could we see more adventures with Peanut and Rowdy?
Brooker: That depends on the Gods, but I love Rowdy and Peanut and it’d be great to see them again – whether that’s interactive or linear or even in the form of some kind of aroma or sauce.
Hollingsworth: I would love to make six of these a year! I feel like the whole point of creating characters like this is to plop them into different scenarios. Rowdy and Peanut in a cake baking competition, as competing door to door salesmen, as rival farmers. The scenarios are limitless!
It feels like these interactive experiences exist in a realm of their own – they’re not quite shows but they’re also not fully video games in the classic sense. It feels like this would almost make it more fun to create than your typical show. What is that process like getting it from the idea stage to the screen?
Brooker: Lengthy. Actually, this all took place during the pandemic which added its own challenges. But it was definitely a spot of light in an otherwise dark time. Watching Rowdy get crushed and sliced over and over made everyday life seem far less grim. Also despite being a fan, I hadn’t worked in animation before so it was a real education for me and I was constantly in awe of the whole team. Actually, not just ‘in awe’. Envious. I was actively envious of them all. I hate them. I hate them. I hate them.
Hollingsworth: Yes! A funny thing is, in the beginning, I called Cat Burglar a "cartoon" and the interactive folks called it a "game". But by the end I was calling it a "game" and they were calling it a "cartoon". Both camps had learned so much from the other and had their process shaped so much by the other, that it changed all of our thinking. But yes, making Cat Burglar was like solving a puzzle! I often felt I was actually in an episode of Black Mirror. We put a lot of work into it so that you couldn't perceive how much work we put into it. There's an hour and a half of unique animation, but that's made of several hundred clips. The joins between those clips, from picture, to music, to the sound effects, took a lot of finessing.
Cat Burglar is now available to stream (& play) on Netflix.