An AI-enhanced animated feature — backed by OpenAI — called Critterz is being prepared for unveiling at the Cannes Film Festival, The Wall Street Journal reports. Should it land on the Croisette, the film would be one of the most prominent experiments yet to see whether generative video can sustain a feature-length, commercial narrative beyond bite-sized social clips or sizzle reels.
A generative tool–made feature
Details remain deliberately scant, but the project is said to be a family-friendly adventure involving woodland creatures, with a script penned by a human and the artwork processed through AI systems to produce the bulk of the footage. The particular tools have not been identified. The approach fits a broader and increasingly common hybrid model: human direction and story decisions upfront, algorithmic image generation to speed the process of creating shots, and human editorial quality control to maintain continuity and tone.
For OpenAI, supporting Critterz would help extend its push from research demos to end-to-end production workflows. The company’s text-to-video breakthroughs have already drawn filmmakers to short-form experiments, but a feature requires something else: repeatable pipelines, uniform character fidelity across thousands of shots, and vaunted version control so scenes can be reworked without visual drift. Those are the tough slogging problems that separate a viral clip from a theatrical release.
Why Cannes was a proving ground
At Cannes, it’s not just a red carpet; it’s a market and a global stress test. Buyers, producers and guild representatives from the industry come down in order to appraise quality and commercial prospects. And a film led in large part by AI that could withstand that kind of scrutiny would send the message to all of that, that here’s something that could transition from curiosity to plausible option in generative pipelines —especially for animation, where labor and rendering and iteration are especially expensive.
The Marché du Film has increasingly raised the volume on production tech talks, with sessions dedicated to generative workflows and synthetic media disclosure. Looking at Cannes would allow Critterz to answer what Mr. Wood says are practical questions buyers have: Can the style hold over a feature running 90 minutes? Does the faces performance fall into the uncanny valley? How re-shootable or localizable is the team without constantly re-animating?
The economics—and the catch
One element of the pitch, according to early reporting, is speed and cost. That premise is resonant in a genre where animated films can remain in “layout” or “lighting pass” limbo for years. Generative tools can streamline the look development process to deliver test–screening interim shots, and prototype entire sequences for final render.
LeesburgLOWER FEES The biggest No 1 at this Northern Virginia public course?But lower expense isn’t the only metric that matters. Legal certainty, labor standards and awards eligibility are becoming more of factors in the evaluation of distribution partners. The U.S. Copyright Office has declared that content made solely by machine can’t be registered; a registrant must disclose the extent to which humankind was involved in its creation. The Writers Guild of America contract limits the script and the credit to what AI can and can’t do in writing. Those frameworks do not rule out any AI-assisted films, but they require documentation: of who did what, and where human creativity resides in the final work.
There’s also the creative calculus. Early AI video frequently falls down on hands, physics, and continuity. Read More: Dr. Ruth Had a Simple Approach to Sex: No ShameA couple of decades ago — so ungainly was digital video that picture quality resulted from geometry, not resolution — such mistakes were never seen, since nothing was done to videos at all. For a certain kind of feature, viewers catch the ink in a character’s tattoos gradually creeping to a new location, or pieces of props jumping from one scene to the other. The solution for that, according to the pair, is to design asset libraries, reference frames, and character bibles that the model can reliably respect — less “type a prompt, get a shot,” more “engineer a repeatable, audit-ready pipeline.”
IP, training data and festival politics
The legal climate remains unsettled. Publishers and creators have filed high-profile lawsuits over training data, while image and video generators face questions about derivative style and attribution. Any Cannes-bound AI feature will be grilled for whether its datasets are licensed, where the reference art came from, and how the production ensures compliance across international territories. Buyers are now being careful; risk in one area can stop a global rollout.
Festivals also weigh perception. It may make headlines that an “AI-made movie” is on the way, but it is the programmer’s search for human voice, and authorship, that counts. Pitching Critterz as a human-led movie, with A.I. in its toolkit (and not a ghost director) is probably sure to be a part of their Cannes’ pitch. Look for the team to put the spotlight, so to speak, on the screenwriters, animation leads and editorial supervisors to prosecute that case.
What success would signal
If Critterz can get to Cannes territory and attract buyers, it would mark the validation of a new level of production—apropos of CAA, more than CGI and less than full synthetic generation. Smaller studios could prototype features without nine-figure budgets, while bigger players could integrate generative systems into previs, background animation or localization.
And if it fumbles, that will be a lesson, as well. The market will soon learn where today’s tools break under full-length pressure and which guardrails — union guidelines, copyright disclosures, platform users’ expectations — need to be rebuilt for A.I.-led films to scale. Either way, Critterz is on track to become a case study in what it really takes to make generative video not just a series of impressive clips but a coherent, marketable movie.
