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.īattle Kitty is arriving at an inflection point for Netflix’s interactive offerings. If this is a hit, Netflix may want to commission some spinoff games, and the team has “lots of ideas” if they do. With so much potential right in front of them, will kids watch this interactive and moan for more actual gameplay? It’s a possibility.

“You wanna watch this video with Kitty in a princess dress? Yeah that’s going to be another 100 hours.” “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. 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. It also meant the Layzell brothers had various ideas for interactivity that had to be scrapped. In doing all this, the Battle Kitty team reached-and extended-the current limits of Netflix’s branching narrative technology. “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.”

“When we joined, Netflix Animation was in its infancy,” says Matt. 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. 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. Battle Kitty started out as a much different show. It also almost broke Netflix’s interactive tech. 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. Today, audiences will find out if they succeeded. He and his brother, supervising producer Paul Layzell, also wanted something else: to make a TV show that felt like a video game. “I think there’s some ancient magic there.” But butts were just the beginning. “There’s just something about little cute characters shaking their butts,” he says.

While creating his new show Battle Kitty, there was one thing executive producer Matt Layzell knew he wanted: booties.

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