Can generative AI animate a decent movie? That question’s getting an early test. 

OpenAI and production studio Vertigo Films have announced a plan to create a feature-length adaptation of a 2023 short film made as a demonstration for OpenAI’s Dall-E image generator. 

The film, called Critterz, will have a budget of less than $30 million. Producers hope to make the movie in about nine months, in time for the Cannes Film Festival next May, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The original short film, also called Critterz, was a play on the nature documentary genre, with the strange creatures in the forest suddenly showing they could understand and talk with the narrator. It was written and directed by Chad Nelson, now a creative specialist at OpenAI. Nelson used Dall-E to generate the images of the environment and the characters, tapping into traditional animation techniques to bring the film to life. 

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Vertigo Films said the full movie will be a family adventure that will «expand the world of the so-called Critterz characters.» James Lamont and Jon Foster, two of the writers behind the movie Paddington in Peru, will write the script. Also involved is Native Foreign, a production studio that uses AI as part of its process. Production has already started, with decisions for the voice cast expected soon, according to the WSJ report.

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The Wall Street Journal reported that the film’s production team plans to feed sketches from human artists hired for the project into AI tools to animate them. Nelson said on LinkedIn that the film would use the latest research models from OpenAI «to innovate new production workflows.»

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Image and video generators have come a long way just in the two years since the original short version of Critterz was made. Dall-E was impressive back then, but early image generators had notorious quirks, like giving people irregular numbers of fingers. Today’s tools can render much more realistic-looking images and video. While they aren’t perfect, tools like Google’s Veo 3 are good enough that AI-created slop is overrunning social media feeds, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to tell what video is real and what’s fake. 

The bigger question isn’t whether these tools can generate a film but rather whether they should — and whether audiences will want to see it. The use of generative AI is controversial in the film industry and in creative fields more generally. There’s also the issue of copyright, with OpenAI and other AI companies facing lawsuits from entertainment and media companies over the materials used to train their tools and the ability of some tools to generate things that look an awful lot like copyrighted characters.