The Brothers Grimm's "Herr Korbes" — KHM 41, forty-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 cock and a hen want to take a journey together, so the cock builds a beautiful carriage with four red wheels and harnesses four mice to it. On the road a cat asks where they are going — to the house of Herr Korbes — and is told to get up behind, lest she fall off in front, and to take great care not to dirty the little red wheels; and you little wheels, roll on, and you little mice pipe out. After the cat come a millstone, an egg, a duck, a pin and a needle, and all of them drive to the house of Herr Korbes, who is not at home. The mice draw the carriage into the barn; the hen and the cock take a perch; the cat sits by the hearth and the duck on the well-pole; the egg rolls itself into the towel, the pin sticks itself into the chair-cushion, the needle jumps onto the pillow, and the millstone lays itself over the door. Then Herr Korbes comes home. He goes to light the fire and the cat throws ashes in his face; he runs to wash and the duck splashes water in it; he reaches for the towel and the egg breaks and glues up his eyes; he sits down and the pin pricks him; he throws himself on his bed and the needle pricks him so that he screams aloud; and as he runs for the door in his rage the millstone leaps down and strikes him dead. Herr Korbes must have been a very wicked man!
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), unabridged: all 391 words — the shortest tale in the project so far, under three minutes. Three voices on three bases: a brisk, bright narrator telling a nursery catalogue at a trot; the cock, pitched up and bright, a strutting little gentleman of the road who built the carriage himself; and the cat, light and quick. Herr Korbes never speaks.
The music is generated by ACE-Step 1.5, a local music model, from a written treatment — the method Graham chose for the series after hearing it on KHM 39, The Elves. The treatment is a toy-band march that gathers passengers: piccolo trills for the piping mice, a snare-drum and woodblock trot for the red wheels, a sly clarinet when the cat climbs up behind, a plodding tuba for the millstone, a bouncing bassoon for the egg, a quacking oboe for the duck and two glockenspiel pings for the pin and the needle; a hushed tiptoe scherzo as each one hides in the empty house; a heavy tuba-and-timpani theme as Herr Korbes stamps home; a cartoon chase of xylophone runs and slide-trombone whoops for the ashes, the water, the egg, the pin and the needle; and after the millstone's crash a mock-solemn little funeral march that ends on a bright final chord under the moral. Seven sections, each generated several times and picked by measurement, cut on the picture changes, the last chord released before the picture ends.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the cock's mallet as he builds the carriage, the red wheels spinning and rolling, the harness, the mice's tiny piping, the cat's paws, the millstone rolling up, the egg rolling, the duck's flat feet, the pin's and the needle's steel pings, the barn door and the perch, the well-pole, the cushion, the bed, the millstone settling over the door, Herr Korbes's boots and his flint, the puff of ashes, the sheet of water, the egg cracking against his brow, the chair, the bed, his stamping run, and the millstone's crash with his hat and shoe landing in the yard.
The art follows the rule installed twenty films ago: the narration is cut into 27 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: more than two thirds of the shots are animated by Wan 2.2 TI2V-5B (40 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 millstone's blow is slapstick, never gore: the stone flat on the step, a hat and a shoe flying into the yard.
Build time: 8h 26m, unattended.