OpenAI Is Bringing an AI-Driven Feature-Length Animated Movie to Cannes

You knew it was bound to happen, and now, it has. The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI is lending its services to the production of a feature-length animated film called Critterz, which is aiming to be done in time for next year’s Cannes Film Festival. That would put its production time at nine months, which is unheard of for a feature-length animated film, but that’s because it’ll be created using AI.

According to the paper, using OpenAI’s resources, production companies Vertigo Films and Native Foreign will hire actors to voice characters created by feeding original drawings into generative AI software. The entire film is expected to cost less than $30 million and will only take about 30 people to complete.

The driving force behind that is a man named Chad Nelson, a creative specialist at OpenAI. A few years back, he was sketching characters with the intent to make a short film with the DALL-E image generator. Which he did and you can watch it here. Based on that, he was then hired by OpenAI and has since decided to think bigger.

“OpenAI can say what its tools do all day long, but it’s much more impactful if someone does it,” Nelson told the WSJ. “That’s a much better case study than me building a demo.”

The film “reflects the kind of creativity and exploration we love to encourage,” a spokesperson for OpenAI told the paper.

The film reportedly has a script from some of the team behind the recent Paddington in Peru, which makes it sound like AI will primarily be used to streamline the animation process. That will, in turn, make producing the movie so much cheaper because the programs are doing the detailed, artful, but often tedious and time-consuming work of human animators. That’s a bad thing for human animators, but, hypothetically, a good thing for the production companies if the result is a $30 million animated film that can be released in theaters in under a year and make money.

Clearly, this is a slippery slope. And there’s no guarantee that a) it’ll work, or b) if it does, anyone will come out to see it. It could just end up being a $30 million waste of time. But, you have to imagine that’s probably more attractive to a film company than spending three times the time and maybe 10 times the money on something that fails in the same way.

Read more about Critterz over at the Wall Street Journal and share your thoughts below.

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