The Brothers Grimm's "The Wedding of Mrs. Fox" (Die Hochzeit der Frau Füchsin) — KHM 38, thirty-eighth 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.
Two short stories about the same house. In the first, an old fox with nine tails suspects his wife and stretches himself out under the bench as if stone dead to try her. The widow shuts herself upstairs, Miss Cat the maid stirs the pot, and the suitors come knocking: a young fox with one tail, another with two, and more, each with one tail more than the last. The cat recites her mistress's grief to every one of them in rhyme — she sits all alone and makes her moan, weeping her little eyes quite red — and carries each proposal up the stairs, trip, trap, tap, tap, tap; and Mrs. Fox asks only one thing: has he nine beautiful tails like the late Mr. Fox? When at last one comes who has, she cries open the gates and carry the old man outside — and the old fox stirs under the bench, cudgels all the rabble and drives them and his wife out of the house. In the second story old Mr. Fox really is dead; the wolf comes courting and is sent away, and after him a dog, a stag, a hare, a bear, a lion and all the beasts of the forest, because one good point the old fox had is always lacking. Then a young fox comes with red stockings on and a little pointed mouth, and the widow orders the room swept, the window up, and her old man flung out of it; and the wedding is danced, and if they have not left off, they are dancing still.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), unabridged: all 787 words, both stories with their headings, every rhyme as printed. Five voices on five bases: a narrator who tells the fable with a straight face and a raised eyebrow, with a sing-song for Hunt's rhymed lines; Miss Cat, pert and quick, reciting the grief she has recited all day; Mrs. Fox, low and languid, whose sob is a performance and whose questions are the truth of her; a well-mannered young fox at the door; and a wolf who is a courtly bass. The nine-tailed foxes are the fifth characters built under the body-traits rule, and the first whose trait is a count: the first wooer has one tail, the second two, and old Mr. Fox and the last wooer a whole fan of them — named for the generator as what it already knows how to draw, a nine-tailed fox, and checked by a local vision model on every plate, key and animation frame.
The score is a buffo singspiel in miniature: a theme that is only complete at the ninth wooer. Old Mr. Fox's nine tails are a nine-note fan on the harp and the whole orchestra; each suitor is given as many notes of it as he has tails — the first wooer one plucked note, the second two — until the fan is heard whole at the door and the wedding begins. Every arrival opens with the KNOCK: three wood-block taps and a horn call; the cat's verses are a pert oboe ditty in six-eight; Mrs. Fox's moan is a mock-lament over the old falling chromatic bass with an oboe sob that gets sweeter every time; the old fox playing dead is a tuba and the basses holding one low note with a sly tick in it, and his rout a presto in D minor with the fan chopped into stabs. The second story opens in a new key with the wolf on the tuba as a courtly gavotte, a parade of suitors a bar each — a bassoon bark, a horn call, a piccolo hop, a lumbering bear, a lion's fanfare — each cut off by the same falling-fifth refusal, quicker every time; the young fox with red stockings is a dotted figure on the clarinet; the old man goes out of the window on a tutti downward glissando; and the wedding is a rustic Ländler that is still going when the picture ends, closed by the cat's three taps alone. Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra through sfizz; no fade-out.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the pot on the fire and the spoon, the bench creaking under the old fox, every knock at the house-door, the latch and the hinge, the cat's quick paws on the stair, her knuckle and then her five gold rings on the parlour door, the bed, the handkerchief, the cudgel and the scramble of the rabble, the wolf's heavy knock and boots, the parade on the path, the broom, the window thrown up and the old man's fall, the crockery and the stamping feet of the dance.
The art follows the rule installed sixteen films ago: the narration is cut into 51 beats of one narrated event each, about seven seconds apiece, and each beat has its own picture whose prompt names the face of that moment. Motion is the default: 39 of the 51 shots are animated by Wan 2.2 TI2V-5B (75 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 one change this film is in the workshop: the vision model's question about a tiny character's size was rewritten after it failed every picture of Thumbling, including the ones where he stood on a palm.
Build time: 18h 28m, unattended.