The Brothers Grimm's "The Elves" (Die Wichtelmänner) — KHM 39, thirty-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.
Three short stories about the little men. In the first, a shoemaker so poor that he has leather left for one pair of shoes cuts them out at night and finds them finished in the morning, so neatly made that there is not one bad stitch in them; a buyer pays more than is customary, the leather becomes two pairs, then four, and so it goes until he is a wealthy man. One evening before Christmas he and his wife hide behind the hanging clothes and watch: at midnight two pretty little men come, sit down at his table and stitch and sew and hammer so quickly that he cannot turn his eyes away. The wife makes them little shirts and coats and vests and trousers and knits them stockings, the man makes them two little pairs of shoes, and the little men dress themselves singing — now we are boys so fine to see, why should we longer cobblers be? — leap over chairs and benches, dance out of doors, and never come again. In the second, a servant-girl finds a letter on the heap of sweepings in front of the door: an invitation from the elves to stand godmother in a hollow mountain where everything is small, the bed of black ebony set with pearls, the cradle of ivory, the bath of gold. She stays three days, comes home with her pockets full of money, takes up her broom — and strangers come out of the house and ask who she is: she has been seven years away, and her masters are dead. In the third, a changeling with a large head and staring eyes is laid in a child's cradle; the neighbour's advice is to boil water in two egg-shells on the hearth, and when the imp laughs at it — I am as old now as the Wester forest, but never yet have I seen any one boil anything in an egg-shell! — a host of little elves bring the right child back and take the changeling away.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), unabridged: all 1,173 words, all three stories with their headings. Five voices on five bases: a plain kindly narrator; the shoemaker, gentle and tired; his wife, warm and decided; the two little men singing their couplet as one tiny bright voice; and the changeling — a bass pitched up into a reedy, ancient, wrong voice from a cradle. The little men are the sixth characters built under the body-traits rule and the first whose size is judged by the rewritten question: every picture of them opens with the thing that gives them scale — the bench, the shoes, the hammer, a candle, a chair seat — and a local vision model is asked, of every plate, key and animation frame, to measure them against it.
THE MUSIC IS AN A/B, for this film only. Instead of being composed note by note for the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra as the previous thirty-eight films were, the score was generated by ACE-Step 1.5, an open text-to-music model run locally on the same GPU, from a written musical treatment: fourteen sections, one idea each, in a planned sequence of keys and tempos — a hushed bassoon for the poor cobbler, a celesta sparkle for the finished shoes, a set of variations that grows richer as the pairs double, a nimble scherzo of xylophone and piccolo for two tiny men at work at midnight, heard a second time and breaking off into delight, a jig as they dance out of the door, a solo oboe over a sweeping-broom rhythm for the servant-girl and a music-box for the hollow mountain, a cold unresolved cadence for the seven years, a cracked music-box lullaby for the changeling, and a final D major chord for the right child on the hearth. The sections are cut on the picture changes, the finale is placed so its last chord releases before the picture ends, and nothing fades out. The next film returns to the composed method unless the comparison says otherwise.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the knife on the leather, the bed, the shop door and the silver counted into a palm, the candle struck, the coats on their pegs as the couple hide, the clock at midnight, the patter of tiny feet on the bench, the little hammer and the needle hauled through the leather, the knitting needles, the tiny clothes laid out, the leap over the chairs and the dance out into the snow; the broom, the letter, the seal broken, the walk up the hill and the mountain's door, the christening bells, the gold poured into her pockets, the strangers' boots; the cradle, the bowl, the fire struck, the egg-shells set in the embers and hissing, the host of little feet, the child set down on the hearth.
The art follows the rule installed seventeen films ago: the narration is cut into 89 beats of one narrated event each, about six seconds apiece, and each beat has its own picture whose prompt names the face of that moment. Motion is the default: two thirds of the shots are animated by Wan 2.2 TI2V-5B (106 generations) from a FLUX.1-dev plate judged by a local vision model against the beat's intent and conformed to locked character sheets with Qwen-Image-Edit-2511; the quiet beats are stills with a slow Ken Burns move.
Build time: 44h 38m, unattended.