The Brothers Grimm's "Little Red-Cap" (Rotkäppchen) — KHM 26, twenty-sixth 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 little girl in a cap of red velvet is sent through the wood with cake and wine for her sick grandmother, and told not to leave the path. A wolf meets her on it, learns where the grandmother lives, talks her into picking flowers, and runs ahead: he devours the old woman, puts on her nightcap and nightgown, and waits in her bed. The child comes, asks about the big ears, the big eyes, the large hands and the terrible big mouth — and is swallowed with one bound. A huntsman passing hears the snoring, finds the wolf in the bed, and instead of firing takes a pair of scissors; two snips and two more, and the child springs out, and the grandmother after her; they fill the wolf with stones and he falls dead. Hunt's text also keeps the second episode: another wolf, a girl who stays on the path, a grandmother who bars the door — and a trough of sausage-water under the roof.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), UNABRIDGED, both episodes: every sentence verbatim and in order. Seven voices, directed by state: the narrator; Little Red-Cap, a child (not afraid of the wolf — that is the point); her mother, fond and firm; the wolf on two chains of one voice — his own, low and chest-swollen, and the voice under the nightcap, pitched up and muffled, so the mask drops on one line, "The better to eat you with!"; the grandmother, weak behind the door and sharp in the second episode; and the huntsman.
The score is a wolf-tale in leitmotifs — the Peter-and-the-Wolf model taken literally. Red-Cap is a skipping two-four tune in G major in the oboe (the flute when she chatters, the solo violin when she dreams among the flowers); its three-note head is her name. The wolf is a chromatic crawl rising from a low E, played three ways: sweet in the celli when he is charming, staccato in the bassoon over a tritone tremolo when he schemes, and an octave up in the clarinet when he speaks in the grandmother's voice. The four questions are a four-step escalation — her head a step higher each time, his answer a semitone higher — until the fourth answer is the crawl itself, tutti, and the pounce. The grandmother is a frail falling phrase on the solo violin that returns in the violas, marcato, when the strength is back in her; the huntsman is a horn call; the mother is a four-chord hymn over a walking pizzicato ground that stops dead on "do not run off the path" and strides home under the last line. A real cadence at the end, released; no fade-out. Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra through sfizz.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the basket and the bottle, paws on the path, flowers picked, the knock, the latch and the door flying open, the bed curtains, the creak of the bed under four questions, the bound and the swallow, the snore, the huntsman's boots and the gun's click, the snips, the stones, the fall, the skin drawn off, cake and wine, claws on the thatch, the pails of sausage-water, the sniff, the slip and the splash.
The art follows the rule installed four films ago: the narration is cut into 62 beats, one per narrated event, and each beat has its own picture whose prompt names the face of that moment. 54 of the 62 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 eight — the wolf stepping onto the path, the straying deeper into the wood, the door flying open, the bound, the snips, the fall, the leap onto the roof and the splash — are continued into motion by Wan 2.2 (23 generations). The narration is the clock: each line's measured duration sets every cut and every bar.
Build time: 15h 26m, unattended.