The Brothers Grimm's "The Godfather" — KHM 42, forty-second 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 man has so many children that he has asked everyone in the world to be godfather, and when one more is born he dreams he must go outside the gate and ask the first person he meets. The stranger gives him a little glass of water: it heals the sick, if Death is standing at the head of the bed; if Death stands at the feet, the sick must die. The man grows famous and rich, saves the King's child twice and loses it the third time. Then he goes to visit the godfather, and the house is a strange establishment: on the first flight of stairs a broom and a shovel are fighting, on the second lies a heap of dead fingers, on the third a heap of dead heads, on the fourth fishes frying themselves in their pans — and each sends him one flight higher, until he peeps through a keyhole and sees the godfather with a pair of long horns. The godfather dives into bed and explains everything away — the boy and the maid, roots of scorzonera, cabbages — and the fishes come and serve themselves up. But the horns? "Oh, that is a lie!" The man runs, and if he had not, who knows what the godfather would have done to him.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), unabridged: all 626 words. Six voices on six bases: a dry, level narrator who lets the horrors arrive without raising his voice; the poor man, earnest and worn; the godfather, pitched down into velvet — the devil as a courteous host, whose velvet tears exactly once; and three things that speak — a broom of twigs, a dead finger's whisper, a hiss of frying fish.
The music is composed for the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra strings through sfizz and a small band through fluidsynth — the series alternates its two scoring methods tale by tale, and this even-numbered tale has the composed score: a danse macabre on five flights. A rocking cradle figure for the house full of children; a clear celesta-and-harp arpeggio for the glass of water; Death at the head as a rising fourth on the oboe and Death at the feet as the same fourth falling onto a tritone on the bassoon; a staircase motif that climbs a whole tone with every flight — five flights, five keys, each with its own grotesque — until the horn, the godfather's own instrument, sounds the two notes of his horns at the keyhole; the godfather's explanations replay each horror in a cheerful major; the lie is one stab; the flight runs the staircase back down in diminution; and the last sound in the film is the horn's two notes alone.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the crowded cottage, the town gate at dawn, the glass of water, a village sickroom and the King's high stone nursery, the hollow stairwell, the broom and the shovel knocking each other about, the dry roots, the cabbages, the pans sizzling on the coals, the keyhole, the godfather's dive into bed, the fishes serving themselves up on the table, and the man's boots down five flights and out of the door.
The art follows the rule installed twenty-one films ago: the narration is cut into 44 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: three quarters of the shots are animated by Wan 2.2 TI2V-5B (61 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 godfather's horns are a body trait: his horned state has its own cast sheet and every keyhole and bed shot is checked by the vision model for the horns before it ships. The heaps on the stairs are drawn as what the godfather says they are — roots and cabbages in the gloom — never as gore.
Build time: 16h 58m, unattended.