The Brothers Grimm's "Fitcher's Bird" — KHM 46, forty-sixth 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 wizard in the shape of a poor beggar touches the eldest of three sisters at her father's door, and she must jump into his basket. In his magnificent house in the forest he gives her the keys and an egg, forbids one room on pain of death, and leaves. She opens it: a great bloody basin, a block, a gleaming axe. The egg falls in, and the spots will not wash off; when he returns he reads them and she goes back into the room against her own will. The second sister fares the same. The third is clever and crafty: she puts the egg away first, finds her sisters in the basin, lays their limbs in order until they move and unite and open their eyes, and passes the test with a clean egg. Now he must do as she says: he carries a basketful of gold to her parents with her sisters hidden under it, and a voice from the basket cries "I am looking through my little window" whenever he sits down to rest. She sets a wreathed skull in the garret window, rolls herself in honey and feathers until she is a wondrous bird nobody knows, and walks out past the wedding-guests and the bridegroom himself — "O, Fitcher's bird, how com'st thou here?" He nods kindly to the skull. Her kinsmen lock the doors and set fire to the house, and the wizard and all his crew have to burn.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), unabridged: all 1,404 words, about eleven minutes. Five voices on five bases: a teller who keeps his voice level through the bloody chamber; the wizard, smooth and reasonable, the beggar and the bridegroom in one voice; the bride, clear, quick and clever, and sing-song calm as the bird; the eldest sister calling from inside the basket under the gold; and a wedding guest.
The music is composed and rendered on this machine — the series alternates its two scoring methods tale by tale, and this even-numbered tale has the composed score: note-by-note writing for the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra's string sections through sfizz and for winds, brass, harp, mallets and percussion through fluidsynth. A dark ballad built on a single limping figure for the beggar in D minor, which turns sweet on the clarinet in the house, strides under the basket on the road, and is straightened at the last into a march for the fire; the three sisters share one folk tune, stated on oboe, flute and violin, and in the bloody chamber that tune is taken apart — its notes scattered on pizzicato strings out of order — and put back together note by note as the third sister lays the limbs in order, until it is whole and warm when they open their eyes; the egg is two celesta notes that acquire a spot; the forbidden door a bare pedal and harmonics; the voice from the basket a high piccolo call that drags the wizard to his feet; Fitcher's bird a fluttering flute over glockenspiel, question and answer with the guests; and the last sound, after the fire's chord, the bird's call alone. Never a fade.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the beggar's shuffle and the basket's creak, bread at the door, the long strides into the forest, the great door and the ring of keys, the little key in the lock, the forbidden door springing open, the egg's fall and the scrubbing, the axe on the block in shadow, the gold poured over the sisters, the basket's straps and the wizard's groans on the road, the feather-bed torn open, feathers and honey, the wedding-guests on the road, the doors barred, torches and the fire.
The art follows the rule installed twenty-five films ago: the narration is cut into 98 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: about seventy percent of the shots are animated by Wan 2.2 TI2V-5B (134 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. The bride's feathers are a body trait: from the honey barrel to the end she is drawn covered head to foot, only her eyes showing, and a vision model checks it on every plate, key and clip. The bloody basin and what lies in it are never pictured — the door, the rim, the shadow of the axe.
Build time: 28h 1m, unattended.