The Brothers Grimm's "The Girl Without Hands" (Das Mädchen ohne Hände) — KHM 31, thirty-first 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 miller meets an old man in the wood who offers him riches for whatever stands behind his mill. He thinks of his apple-tree; it is his daughter. For three years she lives without sin, and when the devil comes she stands inside a circle of chalk and he cannot touch her; he has the water taken from her, and she weeps on her hands and they are clean; he has her hands cut off, and she weeps on the stumps and they are clean, and he loses all right over her. She has her arms bound to her back and walks until night, comes to a royal garden ringed with water, and an angel makes a dam so she can eat one pear from a counted tree with her mouth. The King watches with a priest, hears her say she is no spirit but a mortal deserted by all but God, and marries her, with silver hands made for her. He goes to war; she bears a son; the devil exchanges the letters on the road until the last one orders her tongue and eyes kept as a token. The King's mother takes them from a hind, binds the child to the Queen's back and sends her into the forest, where an angel keeps her seven years in a house whose sign says Here all dwell free — and her hands grow again. The King, who has sworn to neither eat nor drink until he finds her, searches seven years, comes to the house, sleeps with a handkerchief over his face, and is known by his son's refusal to call a wild man father, by his wife's living hands, and by the silver ones the angel brings out. A heavy stone falls from his heart, and they are married again.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), unabridged: all 2,332 words, every sentence verbatim and in order — the cut hands, the hind's tongue and eyes, nothing softened. Eleven voices on eight bases, directed by state: the narrator telling a legend of piety plainly; the devil as the old man of the wood, silky, then furious; the weak miller and his terrified wife; the daughter, the one still voice in the tale, who becomes the Queen; the gardener who saw an angel; the grave King; the priest; the King's aged mother; the angel with a light in her voice; and Sorrowful, the boy of seven.
The score is a chorale-passion for strings and winds. The girl's hymn in D major is the fixed point of the tale: it never changes mode by her own doing, is darkened once in G minor by the exile, is sung in F major by the house where all dwell free, is said in the flute by her child as Our Father, and is sung whole, tutti, in parallel sixths at the end. Her two hands are two voices moving in sixths: at the cut the lower voice stops and the upper goes on alone; at the palace the sixths turn to silver in celesta and glockenspiel; in the little house they grow back as warm violins. The devil is a chromatic line over a tritone, inverted when he mocks, in augmentation when he rages, and the exchanged letter is that tritone as a stab. The stone — the dominant A, born as a sforzando at the cut with the bass on A — is a pedal that returns under every sorrow and is not resolved until the King says a heavy stone has fallen from his heart, when it finally moves to D. Around them: the chalk circle as a celesta loop the devil cannot stop, the moon in the harp, the angel in E Lydian harmonics and harp, the counted pears as a pizzicato ostinato with one stroke missing, the King's horn that wanders seven years down the circle of fifths in augmentation until a bassoon is all that is left of it, the messenger's trot that falls asleep, the hind's oboe, the child's little tune, the handkerchief's floating fall, and bells. Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra through sfizz; it ends with the whole chorale in sixths, a plagal cadence and a single bell. No fade-out.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the mill-wheel's groan, the axe in the wood, coins in the full chests, the chalk circle drawn, the water poured and carried away, the cut (a blade's swish and a block's thud, nothing more), her steps on every road, the moat water stopping to drips at the angel's dam, the pear bitten, the gardener's lantern, the pears tapped as the King counts, the silversmith's hammer, chapel bells, armour and hooves, the quill, the satchel and the letters, the brook, the hind's hooves on the courtyard flags, the palace gate, the wild forest, the little house's door and cradle, the King's boots on rock, the handkerchief's cloth, crockery at one meal, and the bells and flags of the rejoicings.
The art follows the rule installed nine films ago: the narration is cut into 108 beats, one per narrated event, and each beat has its own picture whose prompt names the face of that moment. 96 of the 108 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 (the daughter, the King, the devil as an old man, the miller, the King's mother, the angel, the boy) with Qwen-Image-Edit-2511, judged again for identity, anatomy and head-count, upscaled and given a slow Ken Burns move. Only twelve — the old man stepping out of the trees, the cut, the daughter walking away at sunrise, the dam, the pear, the messenger nodding off, the letter exchanged, the Queen walking out of the gate, the King climbing among the rocks, the handkerchief falling, the King getting up, and the bells — are continued into motion by Wan 2.2 (27 generations). The narration is the clock: each line's measured duration sets every cut and every bar.
Build time: 25h 24m, unattended.