OpenAI has taken an interesting step to prove that artificial intelligence can take on Hollywood. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is backing an animated feature film called Critterz, to showcase how generative AI can cut both time and costs in filmmaking.
Critterz is the story about forest creatures whose lives are upended when a stranger arrives in their village. While that may sound like a standard animated adventure, the way it’s being made is anything but. In order to bring this project to life, the company is providing its latest models, including GPT-5, DALL·E, and its text-to-video system Sora.
The production budget of this film is under $30 million, which is much less than the $100–200 million typically spent on animated features from Pixar or DreamWorks. Besides, where a regular animated film takes three years to complete, the Critterz team expects to finish it in just nine months, where AI models will be managing the majority of the creative tasks like generating storylines, designing characters and scenes, producing script variations, and creating visual concepts.
However, it’s not like it will be a completely AI-powered film. Humans will have their place as well, providing voice acting and guiding the artistic direction.
Since a movie is a visual representation, Sora, the latest video model from OpenAI, will play a key role here, generating lifelike video clips and enabling cinematic grammar, accelerating traditional workflows like storyboarding and animation. The approach is said to streamline repetitive tasks that normally require hundreds of artists, making high-quality animation more accessible to smaller studios and independent creators.
OpenAI sees Critterz as a case study to demonstrate how AI can transform filmmaking. The company is pitching the project not as a replacement for human creativity but as a collaborative tool that reduces production hurdles.
Interestingly, this move puts OpenAI in direct contrast with Hollywood’s big studio system, where long production cycles and massive budgets dominate. While other players, including Netflix and Disney, are experimenting with AI in their pipelines. OpenAI has become the first one to back a full-length animated movie.
Whether going forward, all animated films will be backed by AI, and we won’t have to wait three years to complete a movie, with fewer animation artists involved, that is something only time will tell. It all depends on how successful the Critterz project turns out to be. But given how rapidly AI technology is evolving, especially in video generation, it wouldn’t be surprising if AI ends up creating our animated movies in the future.
