The Brothers Grimm's "Thumbling" (Daumesdick) — KHM 37, thirty-seventh 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 poor peasant and his wife sit by the hearth and wish for a child, even one no bigger than a thumb, and seven months later they have exactly that: a boy perfect in all his limbs and the length of a thumb, who never grows, looks sensibly out of his eyes, and does everything well. He brings his father the cart by sitting in the horse's ear and calling "Gee up!"; two showmen see a cart drive itself and buy him for a handsome bit of money, on his own whispered advice; he rides the brim of their hat, asks to be set down at dusk, and vanishes into a mouse-hole, mocking them while they jab their sticks after him. He sleeps in a snail-shell, overhears two thieves, offers to creep through the pastor's iron bars and hand out the silver — and then shouts "Do you want to have everything that is here?" until the cook sits up in bed and the thieves run as if the Wild Huntsman were behind them. He sleeps in the hay, is carried into the byre in an armful of it and swallowed by the cow, complains that in this little room the windows are forgotten, and screams "Bring me no more fodder" until the maid spills the milk and the pastor, sure an evil spirit is in the cow, has her killed. The stomach goes on the midden, a hungry wolf gulps it down, and Thumbling talks the wolf through his own father's kitchen-sink into the larder, where it eats until it cannot get out again — and then he makes such a din in the wolf's belly that his parents come with an axe and a scythe. "Dear father, I am here; I am in the wolf's body." One blow, knives and scissors, and the little fellow is drawn forth: he has been in a mouse's hole, in a cow's stomach and in a wolf's, and now he will stay with them; they will not sell him again for all the riches in the world.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), unabridged: all 2,216 words, every sentence verbatim and in order. Eleven voices on seven bases: a narrator who tells a wonder-tale fondly; Thumbling, a child's voice pitched up and high-passed — the smallest voice in the tale and the one that makes the most noise, eager, cheeky, sly, mocking, shouting, grave in the dark, weary at the end; his worn, warm father and soft mother; two showmen, two thieves, the terrified maid, the scoffing pastor and a slow hungry wolf. Thumbling is the fourth character built under the body-traits rule and the first whose trait is his SIZE: every picture of him opens with the thing that gives him scale — a thimble, a horse's ear, a hat brim, a snail-shell, an open palm — and a local vision model checks every plate, every key and every animation frame that he is the length of a thumb, not a child.
The score is a miniature: a scherzo-rondo for chamber orchestra in which a five-note figure a thumb's length long returns in every place the tale puts him and is changed by where he is — piccolo in the horse's ear over a plodding cart, a jaunty flute on the hat brim, hidden pizzicato in the mouse-hole, a harp lullaby in the snail-shell, and in the pastor's room the joke of the tale: the tiny figure in augmentation, forte, on the whole orchestra. In the cow it is muffled in the bassoon's lowest register against a lumbering fulling-mill ostinato; in the wolf it rages until the house wakes; at home it finally sits inside the parents' hearth chorale, and the last sound is one high note alone, a thumb's worth. Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra through sfizz; no fade-out.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the poker in the fire, the spinning-wheel, the thimble on the table, the harness and the horse's ear, the cart on the forest track, the showmen's boots and their coins, the hat lifted and set down, the sods and the mouse-hole and the sticks jabbed after him, the snail-shell's hollow knock, the thieves' sacks and the iron bars, the strike-a-light, the hay, the cow's bite and the slide into her belly with its slow heartbeat, the milk pail over, the wolf's gulp, the larder, the kick and thump inside the wolf, the axe, the scissors, and the new little smock.
The art follows the rule installed fifteen films ago: the narration is cut into 140 beats of one narrated event each, about seven seconds apiece, and each beat has its own picture whose prompt names the face of that moment. Motion is the default: 114 of the 140 shots are animated by Wan 2.2 TI2V-5B (219 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 one change this film is in the workshop, not on the screen: the sound-effects cue sheet is now rehearsed against the finished narration before the pictures are made, after the previous film shipped without its effects layer because three cues named the wrong line.
Build time: 73h 55m, unattended.