The Brothers Grimm's "The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage" (Von dem Mäuschen, Vögelchen und der Bratwurst) — KHM 23, twenty-third 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 mouse, a bird and a sausage keep house together and prosper: the bird fetches wood, the mouse carries water, lights the fire and lays the table, and the sausage cooks — rolling itself once or twice through the broth so the dinner comes out buttered and salted. Then the bird meets another bird on the road, is called a poor simpleton for his hard work, and comes home demanding that they change about. They cast lots. The sausage goes for wood and meets a dog, who swallows it and pleads forged letters. The mouse tries to cook as the sausage did and is scalded in the pot. The bird, searching, throws the wood about until it catches fire, runs for water, drops the bucket into the well and falls in after it.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), UNABRIDGED: every sentence verbatim and in order. Hunt's text has no direct speech, so this is a one-voice film — the narrator alone, in nineteen directed states, playing the bird's boast, the magpie's sneer and the dog's solemn lie without a word being rewritten.
The score is a three-part invention for wind trio, chamber strings and harp. The household is written as counterpoint that works: one subject — the house — carried three ways, by the flute (the bird, with a fluttering turn on the long notes), the clarinet (the mouse, staccato, with a scurry) and the bassoon (the sausage, legato, with a roll on every long note), against two countersubjects for the wood and the water, all three together in F major for the only full cadences in the film. When the companions change about, the subject is inverted and the voices are put in each other's registers, where the counterpoint no longer fits; then the invention loses a voice at each death — the bassoon cut off in the dog's jaws on a tritone, the clarinet climbing chromatically into the pot and cut dead, the flute descending into the well — until the house subject stands alone in the celli in F minor and the last chord is released into silence. Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra through sfizz; a real cadence, no fade-out.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: wings and sticks, water poured, the fire lit, the table laid, the pot and the sausage's roll through the broth, a magpie's rattle, the lots drawn, the dog's jaws, the scald, the conflagration, the bucket down the well and the water closing over.
The art follows the rule installed on the previous film: the narration is cut into 32 beats, one per narrated event, and each beat has its own picture whose prompt names the face of that moment. 23 of the 32 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 bird's flights, the sausage in the broth, the dog, the scald, the wood thrown, the fire, the well — 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: 10h 53m, unattended.