The Brothers Grimm's "The Robber Bridegroom" (Der Räuberbräutigam) — KHM 40, fortieth 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 miller promises his daughter to a rich suitor she cannot like. His house is out in the dark forest; he will strew ashes so she can find it. She fills her pockets with peas and lentils and drops them at every step. The house is empty but for a bird in a cage that cries, turn back, turn back, young maiden dear, 'tis a murderer's house you enter here — and, in the cellar, an extremely aged woman whose head shakes, who tells her she has come to a den of eaters of human flesh and hides her behind a great hogshead. The robbers come home with another girl, give her three glasses of wine, white, red and yellow, until her heart bursts, and cut her to pieces on the table; a gold ring will not come off her little finger, so one of them takes an axe to it, and the finger flies over the cask into the hidden bride's lap. The old woman drugs their wine; the bride steps over the sleeping robbers; the ashes have blown away but the peas have sprouted and show the way home by moonlight. At the wedding feast each guest tells a tale, and the bride tells hers as a dream — my darling, I only dreamt this — four times, until she draws out the finger with the ring. The bridegroom, pale as ashes, is held fast by the guests, and he and his whole troop are executed.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), unabridged: all 1,383 words. Seven voices on seven bases: a level ballad-telling narrator; the miller; the bridegroom, velvet and pleasant — the horror is that he is pleasant; the maiden, quiet, then steady and controlled through the dream she tells at her own wedding table; the bird, piping its couplet twice; the old woman, pitched down with a tremble on her voice because her head shook constantly; and a drunk robber with a rasp.
The music is composed again, note by note, for the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra and a small wind, brass and percussion band, after the previous film's one-off experiment with a generated score. It is a gothic ballad built on one refrain heard two ways: the caged bird's warning — turn back, turn back, a falling third sung twice on the piccolo — comes back at the wedding table as the bride's refrain on the oboe, a semitone lower each of the four times she says my darling, I only dreamt this, walking the old falling chromatic bass under the bridegroom's own waltz while the dance thins and stops. The bridegroom is a suave waltz whose bass is that same chromatic creep; the mill a siciliana over a harp water-wheel; the peas a two-note pizzicato drop that turns upside down and grows on celesta and harp when they have sprouted in the moonlight; the old woman a bassoon that ends every phrase in a trill; the robbers a lurching drinking song for tuba and marcato strings; the three wines three chords of three colours and a tritone snap for the bursting heart; the axe one blow; the finger a harp glissando with a glockenspiel on the ring; and the last sound, after the dead march and the final chord, the bird's two notes alone.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the mill wheel and the stream, the suitor's horse, the sack of peas, a couple of peas dropped on the path at every step, the great door of the solitary house swinging shut, the cage's chain and the bird's wings, the cellar stair, the kettle, the hogshead, the robbers bursting down the steps with bottles and torches, the three glasses, the axe on the table and the ring tinkling after, the candle search, the vial into the jug, her bare steps over the sleepers, the bolt drawn, the night run and the wind, the feast's cutlery and cups going quiet as she tells her dream, the chair going over as he leaps up, and the chains of the troop.
The art follows the rule installed eighteen films ago: the narration is cut into 98 beats of one narrated event each, about six seconds apiece, and each beat has its own picture whose prompt names the face of that moment. Motion is the default: two thirds of the shots are animated by Wan 2.2 TI2V-5B (128 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. The dismemberment is never pictured: it is shadows on the cellar wall and the hidden bride's face.
Build time: 29h 23m, unattended.