Critterz is not coming entirely out of thin air; it’s based on a 2023 AI short film from OpenAI’s Chad Nelson. The short itself is based on the Planet Earth series, with narration from “David Attenborough…’s neighbor,” whose documentary gets interrupted by the unusual creatures (read: uncanny valley AI cartoons) from an unexplored forest. WSJ reports that the plan is to hire artists to design the concept of the titular critters that will be fed into OpenAI’s tools, and hire actors for the character voices. The script for the feature was written, per WSJ, by “some members of the team that wrote Paddington In Peru.”
The goal of Critterz is to make the movie in nine months on a budget of less than $30 million, which is exponentially shorter and cheaper than an animated movie usually takes to make. In that sense, Critterz feels a lot more like a proof of concept experiment than a genuine creative endeavor. Nelson sort of articulates as much to WSJ: “OpenAI can say what its tools do all day long, but it’s much more impactful if someone does it,” he said. “That’s a much better case study than me building a demo.”
Critterz plans to answer the question of whether AI is currently capable of making a feature-length film. The next question will be whether audiences—notoriously fickle about regular movies—will be willing to pay to see it. (Nobody involved with this project seems to have raised the other important question: Is it worth the environmental cost?) “There’s been a lot of dabbling, but this shows a commitment from a large AI tool provider that this is possible,” Nik Kleverov, chief creative officer of Native Foreign (and executive producer of the Critterz short) told the Los Angeles Times. “By saying that we are embarking on this, I think it can hopefully open the door for more AI projects to also come out, and we can hopefully see a wave of new great storytelling.”
