Charlie Brooker’s Cat Burglar has plenty going for it. As a celebration of maximalist mid-century, Tex Avery-style animation, it’s just about as genuine as love letters get. In terms of animation – and especially in terms of sound – it is a wild success.
Where it falls down, however, is with its interactivity. Intermittently, Cat Burglar grinds to a halt so that you can answer a pointless trivia question. This element of interactivity is wearying and repetitious, taking a brilliant idea and needlessly diluting it to the point of tedium. What’s so infuriating is that Netflix is capable of creating much more engaging interactive work – but most of this work is aimed squarely at children.
