As JoBlo first reported, the screenwriters behind Paddington in Peru have been attached to pen Critterz, a project arriving with an unusually freighted label: what its makers are calling the first mainstream AI-assisted animated feature built for theatrical release. For an industry we have watched wrestle with the ghost in the machine for the better part of a decade, the headline registers less as news than as tremor.
The project, such as we know it
The details, for now, are skeletal — and that thinness is itself part of the story. What we can confirm is narrow but suggestive: the writers of Paddington in Peru are now linked to Critterz, and the film is being positioned as a wide-release animated feature with AI tools threaded through its production. Whether that means generative assistance for background design, in-betweening, voice modeling, or something closer to end-to-end generation remains precisely the question no one in the trade has yet answered on the record. The Paddington films, after all, were celebrated for their hand-touched warmth — a visual philosophy that exists in deliberate opposition to the algorithmic surface. The collision of those sensibilities, if it is indeed what Critterz promises, is the real subject.
A studio ecosystem in motion
The timing of the announcement is impossible to separate from the wider animation moment. Just this week came word that Bluey — Joe Brumm's beloved Australian series from Ludo Studio — will scale up to its first feature film on August 4, 2027, distributed by Walt Disney Studios and co-produced with BBC Studios. Amber Naismith, whose résumé includes Happy Feet and The Lego Movie, is producing; Brumm writes and directs, with Richard Jeffery co-directing; Joff Bush, the series' longtime composer, handles the score; and Melanie Zanetti and David McCormack reprise their voices as Chilli and Bandit. A fixture in more than sixty countries and a multi-Emmy, multi-BAFTA winner, the franchise is making the leap from 2D to CGI — its own kind of formal reinvention.
Across the Atlantic, the Manchester Animation Festival has launched the U.K.'s first Feature Animation Market Accelerator, building infrastructure for the kind of ambitious long-form projects that once felt the exclusive province of Los Angeles and Tokyo. We are watching the animation world grow more porous, more international, more willing to underwrite oddities. Where Critterz sits inside that constellation is the question worth sitting with.
What we're watching
Three threads, then, to keep in your periphery. The first is creative: who is directing Critterz, which studio is producing, and what, precisely, the AI pipeline does — and does not — do. The second is labor: how the Animation Guild and its international counterparts frame the project once a trailer materializes, and whether new credit protocols emerge to mark algorithm-assisted work. The third is audience: whether families and cinephiles alike will accept a film whose central technique is, by design, less human than the hand that drew Paddington.
For now, we wait. The screenwriters have given us a title; the rest of the picture, for once, is still being drawn.