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Credit: Critterz
Feature-length animation Critterz will be made with the help from OpenAI’s GPT-5
The movie with a $30 million budget is expected to debut at Cannes Film Festival in 2026
Script writers from Paddington in Peru are on board
A new animated feature-length movie, Critterz, is being produced with the help of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, and it could debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 2026.
Critterz, a story about forest creatures who go on an adventure following a disruption in their village, was originally created as a short film using OpenAI’s DALL-E back in 2023.
Now, the creator, Chad Nelson, who is a creative specialist at OpenAI, has teamed up with Vertigo Films and the writers of Paddington in Peru to create a full-length version on a shoestring $30 million budget.
$30 million might sound like a huge amount of money, but compared to other feature-length animated movies like the latest Pixar movie, Elio, which has a reported $200 million budget, it’s barely a scratch.
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Vertigo Films is “attempting to make the movie in about nine months instead of the three years it would typically take.” This is possible thanks to AI and Native Foreign, “a studio that specializes in using AI along with traditional video-production tools.”
The film won’t be fully AI-generated, however. Critterz will have human voice actors, original artwork from artists that will then be fed into GPT-5 and other AI image generation tools, and an original script.
The plan for the movie is to showcase the power of OpenAI’s tools and prove that AI can have a positive impact on the film industry. “OpenAI can say what its tools do all day long, but it’s much more impactful if someone does it,” Nelson told WSJ, “That’s a much better case study than me building a demo.”
OpenAI’s big gamble
An OpenAI spokesperson told WSJ that Critterz “reflects the kind of creativity and exploration we love to encourage.” And the company will hope that the movie showcases the capabilities of creativity through AI, rather than damaging the technology’s reputation in the industry through bad PR.
The original Critterz short film has a measly 3.2/10 on IMDB from 13 ratings, which shows not only the lack of interest in the original source material but also the lack of acclaim from those who did watch the short.
Critterz won’t be the first feature-length AI movie to grace our screens, but it is the first with such a huge budget, albeit small compared to other animated movies. With the backing of the world’s most renowned AI company, Critterz could succeed where other media have yet to do so by emphasizing the ability of AI to foster creativity.
That said, we’ll need to wait until next year to find out if Critterz can really cause a disruption in the animation industry run by juggernauts like Disney and Dreamworks.