The Brothers Grimm's "Mother Holle" (Frau Holle) — KHM 24, twenty-fourth 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 widow has two daughters, one pretty and industrious, one ugly and idle, and loves the idle one, who is her own. The step-daughter spins by a well on the highway till her fingers bleed; when the shuttle falls in, she is told to fetch it out, and in the sorrow of her heart she jumps in after it. She wakes in a meadow in another world, takes the bread out of a crying oven, shakes the apples down from a tree that asks her to, and goes into service with an old woman with large teeth — Mother Holle, whose feather bed, shaken till the feathers fly, is the snow on the earth. Homesick at last, she is led to a great door and a shower of gold falls over her; the cock crows her home. The widow sends her own daughter down the same road. She leaves the bread to burn and the apples on the tree, works one day and lies abed the third, and is led to the same door — where a kettleful of pitch is emptied over her, and it never comes off.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), UNABRIDGED: every sentence verbatim and in order. Eight voices, directed by state: the narrator, the homesick step-daughter, Mother Holle (pitched down into age, the pitch handed out exactly as kindly as the gold), the step-mother's one merciless sentence, the lazy daughter's two shrugs, a chorus of loaves from inside an oven, an apple-tree, and a cock that crows the same crow for gold and for pitch.
The score is a spinning-song and two descents: one theme — the spinning-wheel, a perpetuum mobile in the solo violin — and two sets of variations on the same road. The diligent girl's road says yes at every station: the oven's cry in horn and bassoon, the apples falling as a pizzicato hailstorm, Mother Holle's sarabande, the snow of feathers in flute and harmonics, and the golden rain as the film's one great cadence. The lazy girl's road brings the same variations back in order, each one refusing: the wheel limping, the meadow in E-flat minor, the sarabande losing a bar a day, a rest where the snow should be — and where the gold stood, a kettle of pitch: a black chromatic descent, the harp glissando down, and the cock's crow in G minor. The wheel tries to turn one last time and sticks on one note, and the piece ends on a real cadence, released. Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra through sfizz; no fade-out.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the wheel and the treadle, the shuttle in the water, the jump and the well's echo, the oven and the loaves on the shovel, the apples falling like rain, the feathers shaken out of the window, the great door, the golden rain, two cock-crows, the thorn, and the pitch.
The art follows the rule installed two films ago: the narration is cut into 57 beats, one per narrated event, and each beat has its own picture whose prompt names the face of that moment. 48 of the 57 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 with Qwen-Image-Edit-2511, judged again for identity, anatomy and head-count, upscaled and given a slow Ken Burns move. Only nine — the shuttle sinking, the two jumps, the apples, the feathers, the golden rain, the pitch, and the cock's two crows — are continued into motion by Wan 2.2 (22 generations). The narration is the clock: each line's measured duration sets every cut and every bar.
Build time: 19h 54m, unattended.