One unexpected side-effect of the pandemic has been the premature retirement of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian anthology series Black Mirror. With the world having suffered through just the sort of post-modern nightmare predicted by the show, Brooker has suggested there may no longer be an appetite for “stories about society falling apart”.
But will there be an appetite for Brooker’s new Netflix special, Cat Burglar – an energetic if baffling love letter to such manic mid-20th century cartoons as Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny? That question is complicated by the addition of an interactive element that Brooker has likened to “a pub trivia quiz machine”. So a valentine to violent cartoons spliced with a Choose Your Own Adventure Down the Boozer. Is this the first fruits of Brooker’s new megabucks deal with Netflix – or an episode of Black Mirror brought to life?
Cat Burglar is at its most enjoyable when it isn’t trying to be clever or ironic and instead replicates the eyes-on-stalks energy of classic Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera animations. But then, every so often, along comes the interactive bit as a reminder you’re still trapped in the Brookerverse. The questions are, alas, silly rather than challenging and leech all the fun away. Netflix has ended up with a giddy pastiche to the golden age of American animation with an iffy video game tacked on.
The genius of the Looney Tunes school of animation is that it carved out a space as the anti-Disney. Where the House of Mouse numbed the eyeballs with saccharine, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and chums were wise-cracking and quick-witted. As is Rowdy the Cat, the hero of Cat Burglar, who has many tools as his disposal as he negotiates a madcap world that could have sprung straight from the imagination of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones.
Rowdy can slip out of his skeleton and wrap himself around that of a T-rex. Or insert himself into an Egyptian mural and have the hieroglyphic warriors fire arrows at his enemies. Such tricks are entirely necessary, as he’s up against a daunting foe in Peanut the Security Pup – a mutt on a mission to protect the painting Rowdy is determined to swipe from a museum.
