Vertigo Films and Native Foreign have started production on their animated family feature Critterz, and they’re planning to use OpenAI technology to make the film faster and cheaper than traditional animation. 

Producer/distributor Vertigo is a Federation Studios company that was behind Horrid Henry: The Movie, and creative agency Native Foreign made the Toys “R” Us promo that used OpenAI’s text-to-video tool Sora. OpenAI creative strategist Chad Nelson, who wrote and directed the original AI-generated Critterz short that this new film is based on, is also on board as a consulting producer. 

Announced in March, Critterz is about two little creatures who leave their peaceful village to go on an adventure. It’s budgeted at less than US$30 million, and expected to take just nine months to produce, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

Budgets for animated feature films tend to range widely—and under US$30 million is not unusual for indie titles—but it typically takes several years to produce them. Not only do Vertigo and Native Foreign expect to be wrapped in less than a year, they plan to debut the film at Cannes Film Festival in May before releasing it worldwide. No distribution or theatrical partners are attached yet, as reported by WSJ. 

OpenAI tools such as GPT-5 (a large language model), Codex (a coding tool) and Sora will all be used in the film’s production. But humans are also playing key roles, including in the writing, with Paddington in Peru scribes Jon Foster and James LaMont penning the script. In addition, artists are creating the designs that will be fed into the AI tools, so the film will still be eligible for copyright protection (since purely AI-generated work can’t be copyrighted). And human actors will voice the characters. 

Vertigo and Native Foreign have called this “the first globally commercial family feature film created with artificial intelligence” in a release touting Critterz as a new model for how films could be made. At this point, it’s well-known that AI is a divisive technology among the industry and consumers alike. The Animation Guild is very concerned that AI will eliminate jobs, while some companies like BBC Studios Productions are exploring how to use AI across all of its divisions, including kids & family content. 

The success or failure of Critterz could potentially signal whether audiences are ready to accept AI-made films. But tweens and teens are already embracing the technology, to the point where ChatGPT has become one of their favorite apps, according to KidSay’s Q3 2024 Trend Tracker Report.