The first look at Critterz has arrived, and the AI-generated animated feature is leaning hard into adorable chaos with a lineup of fluffy digital creatures that look ready to take over the internet one big-eyed stare at a time.
The project was first announced last year, but now audiences are finally getting a peek at the film as it heads into the Cannes market through AGC Studios.
The movie comes from OpenAI’s Chad Nelson and features a script from the writers behind Paddington in Peru, which already gives this thing an interesting creative mix of family-friendly charm and experimental tech.
At the same time, Vertigo Films and its founding partner Federation Studios are officially launching a new AI-native production company called amersia. Alongside that announcement comes Woven, the company’s first technology platform, which was used to produce Critterz.
The movie also serves as amersia’s first major showcase for what this AI-driven pipeline can actually do. James Richardson, CEO of amersia, explained the company’s vision in a statement:
“Every major shift in entertainment has come when creatives gained access to new tools — from sound to CGI. AI is the next inflection point.
“We built amersia from the ground up to give artists the power to create at a scale and level of cinematic ambition that simply wasn’t possible before. ‘Critterz’ is the first proof of that shift. The most extraordinary films and brand storytelling of the next decade will be born from this technology.”
The movie is directed by Nik Kleverov, whose previous work includes the opening titles for Narcos and the much-talked-about AI-generated Toys“R”Us commercial created through Native Foreign, the studio he co-founded that also produced the original Critterz short film.
Kleverov will now oversee amersia’s AI-native creative strategy, and he made it clear that the company wants AI to support artists instead of pushing them aside.
“Woven is built around human-led creativity,” said Kleverov. “AI should remove friction, not replace judgment. By automating the repetitive parts of production, we give artists more time to focus on the creative decisions that actually matter.”
That philosophy seems to be at the center of what amersia is trying to build. According to the announcement, Woven started as an internal production system developed specifically for Critterz.
Now the company is already testing the platform with select media enterprise partners ahead of a wider rollout planned for the coming months.
Nelson, who works as a producer and creative technologist at OpenAI, developed Critterz within the OpenAI ecosystem, making the film one of the more high-profile examples yet of AI-assisted animated filmmaking actually moving toward the mainstream entertainment industry.
Whether audiences fully embrace AI-created animated features is still a huge question mark, but Critterz definitely feels like an early glimpse at where parts of Hollywood are heading next.
If the future is packed with weirdly cute fuzzy creatures rendered through experimental AI pipelines, there are worse timelines to land in.
Source: Deadline
