The Brothers Grimm's "Clever Hans" (Der gescheite Hans) — KHM 32, thirty-second of a project to film all 240 Grimm tales, one by one, in canonical order. 100% AI-made on one home GPU (an RTX 3090), $0 marginal cost: nothing was sent to a cloud service and nothing was paid for.
Hans goes to Grethel. His mother asks whither away, tells him to behave, and he says he will. Grethel asks what good thing he brings; he brings nothing and would like something given him. She gives him a needle, and he sticks it in a hay-cart and follows the cart home; his mother tells him he should have put it in his sleeve, and he says never mind, he will do better next time. Next time it is a knife, which goes in his sleeve; then a young goat, whose legs he ties before putting it in his pocket, where it suffocates; then a piece of bacon, which he ties to a rope and drags home, and the dogs eat it; then a calf, which he sets on his head, and it kicks his face. Then Grethel says she will go with him, and he leads her by a rope to the stable, ties her to the rack and scatters grass for her. His mother says he should have cast friendly eyes on her. So Hans goes into the stable, cuts out the eyes of the calves and the sheep, and throws them in Grethel's face; she tears herself loose, runs away, and becomes the bride of Hans.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), unabridged: all 893 words, every sentence verbatim and in order — the suffocated goat and the eyes in Grethel's face, nothing softened. Four voices, directed by state through seven rounds of the same exchange: a deadpan narrator; Hans, cheerful, polite, slow when he thinks, and never once aware that he is wrong; his mother, patient, whose scolding is the same litany every round and whose last lesson is kind; and Grethel, bright at the door, with one tender line.
The score is a rustic rondo with variations in the manner of Haydn's village humour. Hans's flat-footed walking tune in F major (bassoon over pizzicato) is the refrain: it follows every send-off, and every round the band grows by one instrument until the whole village is in it. The mother's question is a falling fourth in the oboe, asked twice; Grethel's question is its mirror, rising, in the flute; the mother's scold is a descending D-minor line that ends on the lesson, one voice heavier each round, and the last lesson — friendly eyes — is the same line reharmonized warm in B-flat major. Each gift varies the way home: the needle is a glockenspiel ping lost among the hay-cart's wood blocks, the knife a xylophone snick and the tune muffled in the sleeve, the goat a clarinet bleat that sags lower and slower in the pocket until the tune comes home in F minor, the bacon a greasy bassoon-and-tuba slide dragged on a celli scrape until the horns bark and the tune loses its tail bar by bar, the calf a tuba moo and the tune upside down on Hans's head until the kick — timpani, bass drum, crash and a stab in the wrong key — tumbles it down the bassoon. Grethel's Ländler is given whole when she says she will go with him, is augmented and stuck on one note at the rack, turns to C minor and runs out of the stable on a scale, and goes with Hans's tune at last at the church door — where Hans steps on the final chord a beat early. Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra through sfizz; one glockenspiel ping to end: the needle, remembered. No fade-out.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the cottage door and latch every time Hans leaves and comes home, his steps on every road, the farm gate at Grethel's, her apron at every gift, the hay-cart's wheels, the knife's small ring, the kid's hooves and the cord, the bacon's long scrape in the dust, the dogs on it, the empty rope, the calf's hooves and the kick, the stable door, the rope and the rack, the straw scattered for Grethel, the knife in the byre (one small ring, nothing more), three small soft slaps for the throw, the rope snapping, running steps and the door banging, and three far church bells for the bride.
The art follows the rule installed ten films ago: the narration is cut into 45 beats, one per narrated event, and each beat has its own picture whose prompt names the face of that moment — the same door, gate, hearth and table seven times, with the faces changing. 38 of the 45 shots are stills — a FLUX.1-dev plate at native resolution, judged by a local vision model against the beat's intent, conformed to locked character sheets (Hans, his mother, Grethel) with Qwen-Image-Edit-2511, judged again for identity, anatomy and head-count, upscaled and given a slow Ken Burns move. Only seven — Hans walking up to the gate, the needle into the hay-cart, the bacon dragged, the dogs, the kick, Grethel led into the byre and Grethel tearing loose — are continued into motion by Wan 2.2 (14 generations). The eyes are not shown. The narration is the clock: each line's measured duration sets every cut and every bar.
Build time: 12h 2m, unattended.