Cat Burglar (2022)

Interesting facts

Cat Burglar is a 2022 animated interactive heist comedy short film created by Charlie Brooker and co-written by supervising director Mike Hollingsworth and director James Bowman, with Annabel Jones as an executive producer. The viewer plays as a cartoon cat burglar named Rowdy who is trying to steal a valuable artwork from a museum which is protected by a security guard dog named Peanut. The viewer must answer a series of trivia questions correctly to advance the story and avoid Rowdy losing his three remaining lives. The film pays homage to the works of animator Tex Avery.

Production

The film was released on 22 February 2022. According to Netflix, the typical runtime is 15 minutes, and the film offers around 90 minutes of animation depending on the viewer's route through the story. The film consists of several hundred segments; the animation, sound effects, and music required dovetailing so that each path between segments progresses seamlessly.

Cat Burglar was the first production by Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones's production company Broke and Bones since it was acquired by Netflix. The pair were previously involved in interactive fiction in the 2018 special Bandersnatch, part of the science fiction anthology series Black Mirror. Though a fan of the genre, Brooker had not previously worked in animation. Mike Hollingsworth served as Supervising Director.

Brooker's previous experience with interactive fiction led him to be wary of complicated story paths. He was interested in the viewer determining the storyline outcome indirectly, rather than through direct choices as with Bandersnatch. He arrived at the idea of a skill-based game, like those in the franchise Dragon's Lair. The questions in Cat Burglar are intended to emphasize the speed of answering over knowledge.

Netflix removed most of the interactive media, including Cat Burglar, from their catalogue in December 2024.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.