The Brothers Grimm's "Thumbling as Journeyman" — KHM 45, forty-fifth 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 tailor's son no bigger than a thumb sets out into the world with a darning-needle for a sword. The steam from his mother's dish carries him up the chimney; he quits a master's house over too many potatoes, hiding from the mistress under a thimble, in the dishcloth, in a crack in the table and in the drawer; he helps a band of robbers rob the King's treasure-chamber, slipping in through a crack in the door, throwing out the thalers one by one and making fools of the sentries from under the coins — "Here am I!" — then flies out of the window on the last thaler and asks for one kreuzer as his share. Hired at an inn, he tells on the maids, who mow him up with the grass and throw him to the cows; a great black cow swallows him, the cow is killed, he dodges the butcher's knife in the sausage-meat, is stuffed into a black-pudding and hung in the chimney until winter, and jumps out when the hostess slices it. A fox snaps him up, lets him go for the promise of his father's hens, and carries him home, where he gives his father the kreuzer he earned on his travels.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), unabridged: all 1,619 words, about thirteen minutes. Thirteen voices on thirteen bases: a teller who enjoys the little man's mischief; Thumbling, small and bright and cheeky, the same voice as the series' first Thumbling; his old father and his dry mother; the master's broad scornful wife; a rough robber; two sentries, one harsh and one kind; the King; the spiteful maids; the gruff innkeeper; a sly fox; and, for Hunt's last exchange, a listening child who asks why the fox got the chickens.
The music is generated by ACE-Step 1.5 from a written treatment — the series alternates its two scoring methods tale by tale, and this odd-numbered tale has the generated score: a journeyman's travelling suite in twelve sections on the picture changes, with named instruments carrying the story — a perky piccolo march over pizzicato strings for the little tailor that opens the film and comes home slow on strings and horn at the end, an airy celesta waltz for the steam ride, a slapstick scherzo with a cranky tuba for the Potato-King's wife, a sneaking bassoon for the robbers, a hushed col legno tiptoe at the vault door and a madcap chase with glockenspiel coins for "Here am I", a mock-heroic fanfare, a gossiping minuet for the maids, a dark lumbering contrabassoon for the black cow, a grotesque chopping dance for the butcher, a sooty music box for the long wait in the chimney, a sly oboe fox trot, and one bright A major chord to end.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the tailor's needle and the sealing-wax, tiny feet on every surface, the steam whirling up the chimney, the thimble and the dishcloth and the drawer of spools, the robbers' campfire, the vault's latch and lock, klink klink klink, the sentries' boots and halberds, the last thaler ringing on the sill, the scythe in the inn's garden, the black cow chewing and the milk in the pail, a slow heartbeat inside the cow, the chopping-knife, the pudding in the smoke, the hostess's knife, the fox's snap and its cough, the hens scattering.
The art follows the rule installed twenty-four films ago: the narration is cut into 113 beats of one narrated event each, about six and a half 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 (144 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. Thumbling's size is a body trait: every shot he is in opens on the giant everyday thing he stands on or in — a thimble, a dish, a coin, a palm — and a vision model measures him against it on every plate, key and clip.
Build time: 53h 12m, unattended.