The Brothers Grimm's "The Louse and the Flea" (Läuschen und Flöhchen) — KHM 30, thirtieth 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 louse and a flea keep house together and brew beer in an egg-shell. The louse falls in and is burnt; the flea screams; the little room-door asks her why, and begins to creak; the broom asks the door why, and begins to sweep; a passing cart asks the broom, and begins to run; the ash-heap asks the cart, and begins to burn; the little tree asks the ash-heap, and shakes off all her leaves; a girl with a water-pitcher asks the tree, and breaks her pitcher; and the spring asks the girl — then says "Oh, ho! then I will begin to flow," and drowns them all, the girl, the tree, the ash-heap, the cart, the broom, the door, the flea and the louse, all together.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), unabridged: all 455 words, every sentence verbatim and in order — a cumulative chain tale, the shortest film in the series. Nine voices, directed by state, and every speaker but the girl is a thing: the narrator telling a nursery chain with a straight face; the tiny flea, one sobbed line; the door with a hinge in its voice; the bristling broom; the rattling cart; the smouldering ash-heap, which catches; the rustling tree; the girl, the one human voice; and the spring, deep under its stone, bubbling and then rising. The same verse is recited seven times, one line longer each round, by a different thing every time.
The score is a cumulative passacaglia for a toy orchestra. A lament ground — G, F, E-flat, D in the celli and basses — is born as the louse falls into the shell and runs under every recited verse, reharmonized each round and one chord longer as the verse grows. Every thing in the tale is a one-second cell in its own timbre, and on each line of each verse that thing's cell plays over the ground, so the music recites the list too: a xylophone tickle for the louse, solo-violin octave hops and an oboe sob for the flea, a celli creak over col legno hinge-taps for the door, a staccato swish for the broom, a bassoon trot with wood blocks for the cart, a clarinet murmur over a timpani roll for the ash-heap, a horn sway for the tree. Each "Then I will…" is a whole tone higher than the last — door, broom, cart, ash-heap, tree, girl — until the circle closes at home and the spring floods on A; and as the tale names its drowned in reverse order the music sinks back down the same ladder, each cell in augmentation, going under. The beer bubbling in the harp at the first sentence is the spring at the last. It ends with the drowning chord, the egg-shell's music-box in minor, two low bubbles, C minor to G minor in the strings alone, and a last plop. No fade-out. Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra through sfizz.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the beer simmering, the plop and long sizzle of the louse's fall, the flea's hops, the door's creaks, the broom's swishes (frantic ones in accelerando), the cart's rumble and the rattle of its run, the ash-heap's hiss and the whoosh and crackle of its flames, the tree's rustle and the patter of falling leaves, the girl's steps and the slosh of her pitcher, the crash of the pitcher on the stones, the spring's trickle, the burst of the flood, the knocks of the drowned things, the quenched heap's steam, the egg-shell's last bubbles and the water settling.
The art follows the rule installed eight films ago: the narration is cut into 29 beats, one per narrated event, and each beat has its own picture whose prompt names the face of that moment. 21 of the 29 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 louse, the flea, the girl) with Qwen-Image-Edit-2511, judged again for identity, anatomy and head-count, upscaled and given a slow Ken Burns move. Only eight — the louse falling into the egg-shell, the door creaking, the broom sweeping, the cart running, the tree shaking off her leaves, the pitcher breaking, the spring bursting out and the flood — are continued into motion by Wan 2.2 (16 generations). The narration is the clock: each line's measured duration sets every cut and every bar.
Build time: 6h 34m, unattended.