AI-Generated Feature-Length Film Critterz Set to Debut at Cannes Film Festival

By Staff Writers Alex Duan, Erika Liu, Mansi Mundada

Creative artificial intelligence has, for the past five years, found itself in the center of a maelstrom of controversy. AI is annexing creative spaces — whether it be the earlier drama surrounding the social media AI Ghibli trend, where Miyazaki’s art style was replicated onto everyday pictures, or professional uses of AI, such as with popular film studio A24’s use of AI on marketing projects like with the Civil War (2024) poster, which has been widely condemned by audiences and critics alike. 

In the midst of this uproar, OpenAI has taken it upon themselves to announce a new project — one likely to stir up more drama than ever before. AI is now making its way to the big screen with the upcoming release of the first feature-length AI-generated movie ever: Critterz. A collaboration between OpenAI Creative Specialist Chad Nelson and Californian production company Native Foreign, the concept was first released in 2023 on YouTube as a short film. In 2026, the same project is set to premiere as a full-length movie at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in France, unique from all other presenting titles by one single aspect: all of its concepts, characters, settings, and major assets are generated by AI. What these companies fail to understand is that incorporation of generative AI in film is not, in fact, progress. Replacement of human talent does nothing but undermine and water down the creativity of the industry on a whole.

Nevertheless, proponents still push for the incorporation of machines in movies, highlighting the numerous advantages to an AI-based approach to film. Most notably, AI usage can significantly cheapen costly film production. Critterz has a budget of just $30 million — an extremely low cost, especially when compared to the average cost of movies made by big studios such as Disney and Pixar, who spend up to $200 million on a single production. However, this figure may not be as groundbreaking as companies hope people will think. Critterz’s financial efficiency is impressive, but not unique —  some conventionally animated films have demonstrated themselves to be  cost-effective as well. For example, Bad Guys (2022), a dreamworks animation, had a budget landing just shy of $80 million. The 2022 film Puss in the Boots: The Last Wish, which won an Annie Award, was made with a budget of about $90 million. Critterz, by contrast, only attains such a low cost through its failed pursuit of what its supporters claim to be a technically superior method of production. The backgrounds and characters are unsettling, warped, and stiff; the plot is  a hackneyed, vapid satire of nature documentaries, and the humor is stilted and awkward, almost robotic. The movie as a whole shows a clear drop in quality from conventional film, showing how the project fails to highlight the supposedly cutting-edge advantage of substituting human labor with the use of generative AI in the industry. Rather, Critterz succeeds in putting on blast the fact that AI as a creative tool is still markedly inferior to the talent we currently enjoy — it creates an empty, corporate simulacrum of what humans can and have already achieved.

Besides the aforementioned practical issues, AI usage in film also raises a host of ethical problems. Namely, widespread AI usage can lead to the erosion of effort and quality in the film industry, undermining the integrity of the art form on a whole. The existence of Critterz represents a core misunderstanding by large corporations of the fundamental essence of films as a mode of artistic expression.  The beauty of moviemaking stems from this level of specifically human detail and thought — the authenticity of which simply cannot be emulated by an instantaneous algorithm. 

Film is one of the most versatile, rich art forms today. However, the studio behind Critterz approaches the medium as nothing more than a technological advancement. Unless audiences want to witness a future film industry inundated by this kind of corporate AI slop, regular viewers must start pushing for the sincere, authentic, and human content that they truly want to see — putting an end to this trend before it consumes our TV screens.