This month, Netflix premieres a clever new interactive animated special titled Cat Burglar. Inspired by classic Tex Avery toons, the special runs about 15 minutes, but it offers over 90 minutes of animation as viewers answer trivia questions to help Rowdy Cat break into a museum to steal some prized paintings. Created by Charlie Brooker (Black Mirror), the special is exec produced by Brooker, Annabel Jones and Emmy-winning director Mike Hollingsworth (BoJack Horseman, Tuca & Bertie). Art director is Avner Geller, with animation produced by Ireland’s Boulder Media. We caught up with the always-charming Hollingsworth to find out more about this entertaining special:
Animation Magazine: First up, congrats on the wonderful new project. How did you approach it and how many different versions of the script did you have to write?
Mike Hollingsworth: It was quite a daunting task. Taking into consideration all the different avenues you go down we were essentially making a Tex Avery movie. The initial idea was that it would be board-driven. But quickly our director (and my eventual co-writer) James Bowman, and I realized that that was insanity. The interactive aspect of the project meant that though the comedy could be insane, the story structure still needed to be sound. This led to James and I having our first meeting in my backyard in the early days of the quarantine. We sat on opposite ends of a long patio table and figured out the structure of the cartoon. Once that was sorted, James and I would individually write segments and then come together and go, ‘We both wrote a hieroglyphics bit. Let’s take the best parts of each and put them together into one killer segment.’ I would go off and do that while James supervised all the boarders.
How long did it take to produce this interactive short?
[Laughs] I believe that the interactive aspect of it was just recently finished. That team is so amazing! Netflix is moving into this interactive business in a big way, and I think they’ve attracted a lot of people who are very curious and excited to be in there on the ground floor. I myself was aware that I was getting an opportunity to learn about this new technology on the job. And now, my team and I are essentially the first people trained in this type of storytelling.
Where was the animation produced and which animation tools were used?
The animation was produced with Harmony by Boulder Media in Ireland under the superb supervision of Gillian Comerford. I remember we were on a video meeting with them after the animation started to come in and they alerted us to the fact that the shots we were seeing were barely puppeted, because the animation was so full that they basically had to just traditionally animate it. I giggled and exclaimed, “I know! It’s beautiful.” In the end, this was doable because most of the shots only had two characters running around. And to their credit, they got it all done on time even though they had to change what they hoped would be their approach.
How many people worked with you on it?
This is a pandemic silver lining: Because everybody was going to be working from home anyway I thought, “Maybe I can approach artists I’ve always wanted to work with from around the globe but haven’t been able to?” One was David de Rooij in Holland. I had always been a fan of his cartoons on YouTube. I put his name up as a storyboarder and I heard from the recruitment department that it’s generally a lot of added work to engage an artist in another country. To that I replied, “So, I’m not hearing that it’s not possible, it’s just some extra work? So … can we do that work?” We ended up working with artists all over the world. And here I should point out how universal the cartoons of Tex Avery, MGM and Warner Bros. are internationally. From the United States, to Holland, to England and Turkey, everyone loves classic animation!
What would you say was the toughest aspect of the project
It really was the interactive aspect. James Bowman and I could bang out Tex Avery style gags all day long, but tailoring all of the comedy so that it set up the next level was difficult. We would lock storyboards on level one and move into level two only to figure out that we didn’t properly set something up. So then we had to go back and unlock level one. One fun aspect though was discovering that we had a third lead character: Rowdy Cat’s Ghost. In our initial planning, we didn’t realize he would play such a pivotal role. But once it became apparent he was going to have a lot of screen time then it gave me a whole new character to play with.
What is your take on interactive animated content now that you have completed one?
I love it! When you play this thing it really cooks. And a fun aspect is you can play one time through and then give the remote to your pal and let them play while you check out all the animation that you missed. It’s endlessly rewatchable!
What was the most fun part of the job?
It was a dream come true to be directly asked to create Tex Avery style gags (instead of just sneaking them into BoJack). I’m a huge Tex fan, so much so that I named my son Avery after him. Working on Cat Burglar was a dream come true and I hope we get to make a lot more of them.
What was the toughest part of it?
Branch Manager! — That’s the name of the interactive software. It was the boss! Whenever I would approve a bunch of thumbnails or boards, they would get loaded into Branch Manager so that we could really kick the tires. Then we would discover a jump-cut or that we needed a better downbeat reset at the top of the next sequence. Stuff like that. The keeper of Branch Manager was Russell McLean. He was our interactive producer and he had developed the software in conjunction with the Netflix interactive team while they were working on Bandersnatch. It’s, to me, a mind boggling tool that I purposely and happily never really wrapped my head around.
Do you have one scenario that you loved more than the others?
There’s segments that sprung to my mind — like the Ancient Egypt meets drag Bugs Bunny segment “CleoCATra” — the moment I knew that I was going to be working on this project. And then there’s ones that I never thought would work, like Bowman’s “Jurassic Skin Swap,” that turned out better than anything else in the whole ding-dang cartoon!
How long does it take to try out all the possible scenarios?
You’ve saved the best question for last. A typical play through will take about 13 minutes. But after that, you’ve only seen a small percentage of the animation that we’ve created. You have to keep playing to win all six paintings. On the flipside, there’s also six different hilarious deaths. One even might feature a satanic send-up of the king of cartoons himself.
Cat Burglar premieres globally on Netflix on Tuesday, February 22.
