The Brothers Grimm's "The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs" (Der Teufel mit den drei goldenen Haaren) — KHM 29, twenty-ninth 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.
A poor woman's son is born with a caul, and it is foretold that at fourteen he will marry the King's daughter. The bad-hearted King buys the baby, shuts him in a box and throws it into deep water — but the box floats like a boat to a mill, and the miller's family raise him. Fourteen years later the King sends him to the Queen with a letter ordering his death; he loses his way, sleeps in a robbers' den, and the robbers take pity on him and rewrite the letter so that he marries the princess instead. The furious King sets one last task: three golden hairs from the head of the Devil. On the road three people ask him what he knows — a town whose wine-fountain has run dry, a town whose golden-apple tree bears nothing, a ferryman who can never stop rowing — and three times he answers "I know everything... only wait until I come back." In Hell, the Devil's grandmother turns him into an ant in the folds of her dress, and as the Devil sleeps with his head in her lap she plucks the three hairs one by one, each time pretending a bad dream that tricks him into giving away an answer.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), unabridged: all 2,539 words, every sentence verbatim and in order — the longest film in the series so far. Twelve voices, directed by state: the narrator, telling a comic quest with a straight face; the luck-child, bright and unbothered, the same easy voice every time he says "I know everything"; the King, honey, then ice, then fury, then greed; the Devil, a big drowsy grumbling householder; his grandmother, gruff to the boy and sweetly lying to her grandson; and the gossip, the poor mother, the miller's wife, the old woman of the robbers' den, the watchman, the gatekeeper and the weary ferryman.
The score is a comic fairy-tale suite in the spirit of Peter and the Wolf, with a leitmotif for every character. The lucky boy whistles the same carefree tune from his cradle to the gates of Hell — minor when he is sold, a celesta for the baby in the box, a tiny xylophone for the ant. The crooked King marches in a key with a bent note in it, sweetened whenever he pretends to be friendly. The death-letter is a falling diminished seventh; turned upside down and into major, it becomes the head of the wedding march. The robbers stomp in D minor until they feel pity, and then the same tune turns to B-flat major in the strings alone. The Devil stomps in on tuba and snores while his grandmother sings him a clarinet lullaby. Every "I know everything" is answered by the same three-note flourish over a new harmony, each golden hair is plucked with a pizzicato snap a step higher than the last, and in the end the King's own theme is left rowing back and forth in the tuba, forever — then a full chord in G. No fade-out. Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra through sfizz.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: a purse of gold, the box hitting the water and bobbing up again, the mill-dam and the turning wheel, a storm, a quill scratching a death-warrant, owls in the night forest, the robbers' hearth and their boots, a letter torn in two, wedding bells, town gates and a squeaking cart, the ferry's oars, the sooty cavern of Hell, the Devil sniffing and banging pots, his snoring, the tiny gold tink of each hair, his chair going over as he roars, the asses' hooves and their chinking sacks, and the ferryman's leap onto the shingle.
The art follows the rule installed seven films ago: the narration is cut into 109 beats, one per narrated event, and each beat has its own picture whose prompt names the face of that moment. 98 of the 109 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 with Qwen-Image-Edit-2511, judged again for identity, anatomy and head-count, upscaled and given a slow Ken Burns move. Only eleven — the box thrown into the water and floating away, the miller's boy hooking it out, the letter torn up, the Devil searching every corner, the first and second golden hairs, the Devil leaping up, the gold-laden asses, the King hurrying to the river and the ferryman putting the oar in his hand — are continued into motion by Wan 2.2 (23 generations). The narration is the clock: each line's measured duration sets every cut and every bar.
Build time: 24h 8m, unattended.