OpenAI backs the first animated film made with AI. Premiere aims for Cannes

"Critterz" is to be the first full-length animation made with artificial intelligence. It drew attention through OpenAI's backing. The company wants to promote its own tools as a solution that delivers professional results on a commercial project, not just in demonstrations of what is possible. The film is to reach screens in 2026, and the team is aiming for a premiere at Cannes. The story follows forest creatures living in a quiet village, whose daily life is disturbed by the arrival of a mysterious stranger.

From DALL·E 2 to Sora

The project began long before the current wave of generators. Creative adviser Chad Nelson came up with the idea for the film three years earlier, using the DALL·E 2 image generator for early concept work. Today Nelson runs the production. The partner studios are Vertigo Films of London and Native Foreign of Los Angeles, and financing came from Paris-based Federation Studios. The process combines the GPT-5 language model with tools for generating images and video, including Sora. What matters, though, is what people do in that chain. Artists prepare initial drawings that go into the AI tools, and real actors record the characters' voices. That is meant to close the production in nine months, against a typical animated film cycle of up to three years, and keep the budget below 30 million dollars, well under industry standards.

Production is already under way

Filming and production work have started, and casting for the voice roles is in progress. The team has not yet disclosed the name of a distributor or a promotion plan. For OpenAI the project is above all a spectacular proof. It is meant to show that its tools deliver a professional result in commercial production, not merely a demonstration. The stakes are bigger than one film. The point is to convince studios that generators fit into a normal shooting schedule rather than into a showcase of capabilities.

People as legal cover

The decision to involve people also has a legal dimension. Vertigo Films co-founder James Richardson calls "Critterz" an "ambitious large-scale experiment," and Native Foreign co-founder Nick Kleverov says plainly that the team deliberately brought in creators, because a work generated entirely by machine cannot receive copyright protection. The voice performances and original artwork are meant to raise the film's chances of getting that protection. It is the same principle seen in case law and in European law: protection requires a creative human contribution. So the project is best read not as proof that AI replaces a studio, but as a test in which producers first check where the line of profitability runs and where the line of law runs. The makers have not yet announced a distributor or a promotion plan.