Apr 19, 2022 7:00 AM

Battle Kitty Stretches the Limits of Netflix’s Interactive Tech

The animated kids series plays like a video game—and demonstrates the potential of interactive shows.

Characters from the animated game and series Battle Kitty

While creating his new show Battle Kitty, there was one thing executive producer Matt Layzell knew he wanted: booties. “There’s just something about little cute characters shaking their butts,” he says. “I think there’s some ancient magic there.” But butts were just the beginning. He and his brother, supervising producer Paul Layzell, also wanted something else: to make a TV show that felt like a video game.

Today, audiences will find out if they succeeded. Battle Kitty, which follows feisty, fighty Kitty and shy, cautious Orc as they confront monsters, is both a love letter to the video games of the 1990s and the most innovative Netflix interactive offering since Annabel Jones and Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror episode “Bandersnatch.” The show’s futuro-medieval world, Battle Island, took nearly five years to make, and its nine-episode boss-battle storyline plays out on a map that can be navigated start-to-finish from within the show—no jumping to the episode list required. It’s wildly creative. It also almost broke Netflix’s interactive tech.

That wasn’t the intention, though. Battle Kitty started out as a much different show. The initial pitch the Layzell brothers took to Netflix in the summer of 2017 was for an animated series based on Matt’s The Adventures of Kitty and Orc Instagram sketches. At the time, Brooker had only just met with Netflix about “Bandersnatch,” and the streamer’s first choose-your-own-adventure experiment, Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale, was barely out. “When we joined, Netflix Animation was in its infancy,” says Matt. “As we were developing Battle Kitty, they were building this animation studio around us; it was this DIY startup atmosphere, and everyone could fit into one lunch hall.”

It was during these scrappy salad days that the concept for the show took shape. The creative team locked down the season’s central monsters-and-realms plot, and the Layzells came up with a concept that they took to Dave Schlafman, the head of design for Netflix’s interactive offerings: overworld maps. It’s a navigation method familiar to anyone who’s ever taken part in a role-playing game, but one totally new to TV. “We took the branching narrative technology they’d used for other shows,” says Matt, “and broke it, almost, used it for something it shouldn’t be used for.” In an RPG, overworld maps are designed to connect up all the possible levels or locations in a game. In Battle Kitty, they feature simplified versions of the characters and allow the viewer-player to jump into “quests” (mini episodes typically two to 12 minutes long) in what looks like an over-embellished menu screen.

“Bandersnatch,” and the 20 or so interactive kids specials built with Netflix’s Branch Manager, are generally made up of “segments,” “memories,” and “recaps” that viewers select as they make their own way through the series. In addition to the maps and quests, Battle Kitty’s building blocks include “gates” and “states.” In the show, you can’t progress to the next episode (or batch of three episodes) without collecting the correct number of “monster keys,” which you get after monster battle clips are viewed, similar to beating a boss at the end of a game level. That meant Schlafman and his product designers needed to not only build a more complex user interface for map navigation, with buttons that signify whether or not you’ve watched a mini episode, they also had to preserve a logical user progression mechanic throughout.

“We tried to add layers of discovery to the maps,” says Paul. “We were watching all the animatics, trying to come up with clever ways to tie them into the story, to uncover something in the environment or just connote change in the environment to show you’re progressing.” (Let the timer run down a few times on different maps for a neat running gag.) The maps are also designed to fill the time in between episodes, keeping you in the show. The interactivity of Brooker’s recent cartoon-meets-trivia-game Cat Burglar pulls you way out of the story. Battle Kitty’s approach to play brings you further in.

In total, the teams behind Battle Kitty built 31 maps across the nine episodes, with a total of 159 states (unlockable map layers) between them. Ultimately, the team spent two and half years adding extra features to Netflix’s interactive framework to accommodate everything the Layzells wanted to do.

Style-wise, the animation was always meant to be a mashup of a 3D game aesthetic and classic cartoons like Dexter’s Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls. “We wanted it to feel like playing Nintendo video games in summertime,” says Paul, rattling off influences from Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening to Animal Crossing and Kingdom Hearts; even Fortnite gets a nod in the shape of the warriors obsessed with loadouts and weapons. Nods to anime touchstones like Dragon Ball Z, Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, and Sailor Moon are also prevalent.

Courtesy of Netflix

In doing all this, the Battle Kitty team reached—and extended—the current limits of Netflix’s branching narrative technology. It also meant the Layzell brothers had various ideas for interactivity that had to be scrapped. Like, for example, a counter for the number of keys a viewer had collected, or a bonus quest concept that would have allowed them to pick Kitty’s fashions and watch quests with the character in lots of different outfits. “We quickly found that because we’re having to use this technology that’s not really built for what we want to do, the number of iterations we’d have to make was crazy,” Matt explains. “You wanna watch this video with Kitty in a princess dress? Yeah that’s going to be another 100 hours.”

With so much potential right in front of them, will kids watch this interactive and moan for more actual gameplay? It’s a possibility. If this is a hit, Netflix may want to commission some spinoff games, and the team has “lots of ideas” if they do. They also have potential plans for a season 2, should that be greenlit, but whether or not that would include further expansion of the branching narrative tech functionality remains to be seen.

Battle Kitty is arriving at an inflection point for Netflix’s interactive offerings. While the streaming service has announced more choose-your-own-adventure titles, like the rom-com film Choose Love, they won’t be guaranteed hits. Since June 2021, Cat Burglar is the only Netflix interactive offering to place in the Top 10 on top10netflix.com, according to Variety. This signal of popularity, in the absence of a full breakdown of viewing figures, suggests that, short of securing the creator of Black Mirror for life, the format needs to substantially evolve if it is to play a part in expanding how the platform is used day to day. Netflix VP of comedy and interactive Andy Weil told the Verge in February that one-offs like Cat Burglar might “push more people into games,” referring to the small mobile games library launched last year. But even that may not guarantee the long-term future of interactive offerings like Battle Kitty.

Viable or not, it’s a wild experiment, one sure to attract more than a few young fans (and their nostalgic parents). It’s too ambitious to be a blueprint for every new title, but it proves there are new ways for interactivity and story to complement and enhance one another on a streaming series. The best way to explain Battle Kitty is that it’s a TV show and a game, where to complete the game you have to watch the show. Surprisingly, it works.