‘Cat Burglar,’ Netflix’s New Interactive Cartoon From ‘Black Mirror’ and ‘BoJack Horseman’ Producers, Is a Wacky Good Time: TV Review
variety.comCaroline Framke Chief TV CriticKnowing that Netflix’s “Cat Burglar” was created by Charlie Brooker of “Black Mirror,” and that the “Black Mirror” take on a choose-your-own-adventure episode (2018’s “Bandersnatch“) represents one of that show’s biggest horrors, I kept waiting for “Cat Burglar” (out today on Netflix) to take some terrible turn of existential dread.
But after playing through several “Cat Burglar” scenarios, the opposite proved true. From Brooker, “Black Mirror” producer Annabel Jones and supervising director Mike Hollingsworth (“BoJack Horseman”), “Cat Burglar” is as straightforward a take on Tex Avery style cartoons as its unusual format allows.Following in the footsteps of other interactive Netflix titles like “Bandersnatch” and the surprisingly successful “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” movie, “Cat Burglar” lets viewers steer the story by making choices onscreen along the way.
In this way, the plot also acts as a mission: get from point A to point B without making a choice that ends in such a disaster that you get punted back to the very beginning.
In “Bandersnatch” and “Kimmy Schmidt,” the options affect the direction of the narrative. That’s not really the case in “Cat Burglar,” which has a much simpler plot (“a cat needs to outsmart a dog guard in order to burgle a museum”) and shorter runtime (about 15 minutes to get from Rowdy Cat eyeing the museum’s giant walls to snatching the coveted painting).
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