A Very Long Carriage Ride

The first dual release in cinema history. "A Very Long Carriage Ride" is both the first stop motion AI animated feature film ever made, and the first 2D Disney style animated feature film.

Hooroo Jackson’s A Very Long Carriage Ride is the first dual release in the history of cinema, marking the first AI stop motion animated feature film, and the first AI classic style animated feature film at once, both made completely with AI tools. And like Jackson’s previous films, it was created entirely by one person. No crew. No studio. No compromise.

A Very Long Carriage Ride is a period adventure set in the divided land of Gooseberry. Autumn Watt—a sharp, principled letter-writer—sets off with her best friend, the pragmatic surgeon Dr. Katy Bloom, to attend a weekend of high-society weddings. On the road they learn that Gooseberry’s celebrated philanthropist, Meijor Donaldson, has secretly ruined and abused three women, among them Lady Brandy, estranged daughter of Hopkins Brandy, a once-great merchant now sunk in drink. Autumn joins forces with the broken but still-fierce Brandy and a small gaggle of travelling companions, determined to carry the women’s joint accusation straight to Donaldson’s own wedding. But beneath its wit, magical realism, and romantic swerves, hidden secrets lurk. The film is a simple story about finding the courage to speak when silence is safer—presented in two parallel, first-of-their-kind releases, Jackson calls it, “one film, two ways.”

The $2,000 budgeted production ($1,000 per version) proves the concept from Jackson’s book, “The New Machine Cinema: Foundations in AI Film Theory”, and his essay “The Living Breathing Cinema”—a framework where a film isn’t a fixed object, but a living, changing work. Here, audiences choose which version they want to watch. Both are the same story, same performances, same vision, told through different aesthetic forms.

“One Film, Two Ways: Introducing A Very Long Carriage Ride” explains his philosophy, positing that ‘a film is no longer a film, a film is a series of possibilities.’ Carriage Ride premiered on April 22nd, 2025, and was released commercially on May 30th, 2025 on blu-ray and streaming (stop motion, classic-style).

The dual-release required unprecedented effort, managing the workload of two entire productions simultaneously, without any support infrastructure. It was Jackson’s third major milestone in cinema history following the first fully AI feature film ever made (Window Seat, July 2023) and the first fully AI animated feature film ever made (DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict, July 2024) with 100% of its sound, music, video, and performances created using only AI tools.

The creation of the screenplay, written by Jackson and workshopped with AI-is documented in The Making of ‘A Very Long Carriage Ride’, serving as both a production diary and a complete archive of his dialogue with LLMs during the six month production of the film. Additionally, over 40 hours documenting the complete making of the film in real time were also recorded.

Accolades:

Winner, Best AI Film, Red Rocks AI Film Festival

Official Selection, Seoul International AI Film Festival

Official Selection, AI Film Awards, Venice

Reviews:

JustForMovieFreaks: “A glimpse of cinema’s next frontier, where form bends to story, and story bends to possibility.”

Martin Carr: “Writer-director Hooroo Jackson is busy carving his own niche in film history with the help of artificial intelligence.”

ReelReviews: Reel Reviews: “This is quite an accomplishment.”

Review Ron: “An Appealing AI-generated Period Adventure About Cutting the Mighty Down to Size”

Mike Haberfelner: “As an experiment (and a successful one at that), A Very Long Carriage Ride is nothing short of fascinating, as it’s not just one but two AI-animated features following the same screenplay.”

FilmThreat: “Hooroo Jackson is the only filmmaker/animator who is submitting work that goes beyond the typical AI memes and fake movie trailers.”

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