British indie studio Vertigo Films (Horrid Henry: The Movie) and LA-based creative agency and production company Native Foreign have pulled the curtain back on a new AI animated family film they’re working on together.

Critterz is a feature-length adaptation that expands on a 2023 short film produced by Native Foreign. It generated more than 100,000 views on YouTube and has been billed as the first animated short film designed using AI-generated visuals with Dall-E 2 technology (a text-to-image model from OpenAI).

Notably, the theatrical pic will feature a script written by James Lamont and Jon Foster—the writing duo who (along with Mark Burton) worked on 2024’s Paddington in Peru. Lamont and Foster have plenty of kids TV credits, including The Amazing World of Gumball (2011 to 2016) and The Adventures of Paddington (2019 to 2023).

Vertigo co-founders James Richardson and Allan Niblo are producing Critterz with Native Foreign CCO Nik Kleverov. Vertigo CEO Jane Moore is attached as an EP, and Chad Nelson—an OpenAI creative specialist who wrote and directed the original short—will be involved as a consulting producer. The film is expected to go into production in April.

A 2025 PGA Innovation Award finalist, the Critterz short was also screened at a number of festivals in 2023, including Annecy. It featured a quirky premise about a group of forest-dwelling creatures who break the fourth wall and tease an off-screen nature documentary narrator. Specifics about the plot of the upcoming feature film are not yet available.

“When I first explored OpenAI’s Dall-E, I immediately found a creative brush unlike any other. The AI didn’t replace my vision; it expanded it, helping me dream bigger and move faster,” Nelson says. “And now, with the rapid advancements made in AI since we launched the original Critterz, we can fully realize these lovable characters and achieve our vision more completely.”