GENERATIVE AI
When Chad Nelson sketched his first forest creatures three years ago, he was simply experimenting with OpenAI’ s then-new DALL-E image generator. Today, those same characters are the stars of Critterz, a feature-length animated film with a sub-US $ 30m budget, a nine-month production timeline and ambitions to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
If traditional Hollywood represents the old guard of storytelling, Critterz is the rebel: proof that Gen AI isn’ t just disrupting how stories are made, but who gets to make them.
Google has taken a different tack entirely. Its Gemini Storybook tool democratises narrative creation at scale. Anyone can describe any story they can imagine and within seconds they’ ll have a personalised, illustrated 10-page book, complete with read-aloud narration in over 45 languages.
One is aiming for the big screen; the other for the intimate screen of a parent’ s phone at bedtime. But what are these imaginative tools designed for children teaching enterprises about the future of Gen AI?
Together, they represent the dual fronts of AI’ s invasion into one of humanity’ s oldest traditions: storytelling.
Disrupting Hollywood: How AI cuts film costs and production timelines The question isn’ t so much whether AI can tell stories anymore, but about what happens when it does.
The numbers tell part of the story. Traditional animated features can cost upwards of US $ 200m and take three to five years to produce. Yet Critterz is attempting to do it in nine months for a fraction of the cost.
“ I have never been in this position in my life where we are starting a movie and I have no idea what’ s about to happen,” admits James Richardson, Co-founder of Vertigo Films, the London-based production company behind the project.
54 November 2025