The Brothers Grimm's "The Bremen Town-Musicians" (Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten) — KHM 27, twenty-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.
An old donkey who has carried corn-sacks to the mill for many a long year sees that no good wind is blowing and sets out for Bremen to be town-musician. On the road he collects three more old creatures whose masters mean to be rid of them — a hound too weak to hunt, a cat with a face like three rainy days, and a cock who is to be put in Sunday's soup. They never reach Bremen. In the forest at night the cock sees a light; it is a robbers' house, and the four make their music at the window — the donkey brays, the hound barks, the cat mews, the cock crows — and burst through it. The robbers flee into the forest. At midnight one creeps back, and meets a witch, a man with a knife, a black monster and a judge.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), unabridged: every sentence verbatim and in order. Seven voices, directed by state: the narrator, deadpan; the donkey, old and good-humoured, the leader; the hound, spent; the cat, sour; the cock, proud, then doomed, then crowing; the terrified robber with his four monsters; and the robber captain's one gruff line.
The score is a town-band suite for four old animals — Peter and the Wolf turned inside out, every principal an instrument that has been thrown away. The donkey is a plodding bassoon tune in F with a bray dropped an octave like a sack (he plays the lute, so the harp strums under him); the hound is a tired horn call up the D-minor triad, and from the moment he is told he will beat the kettledrum the timpani walks with the road; the cat is a sour chromatic clarinet serenade, her mew a slide in the solo violin; the cock is the oboe when he talks and the trumpet when he crows. The road is a walking pizzicato ground that gathers each new companion — a classic accumulation. The town of Bremen is a dotted civic march that is only ever glimpsed and never reaches its cadence until the last page, when it becomes the tune of the house they keep. At the window the four motifs sound at once, in four keys, fortissimo; the glass shatters in the glockenspiel. At midnight each of the robber's monsters is one of the motifs distorted — the witch is the cat over a tritone tremolo, the black monster the donkey in the contrabasses, the judge the cock as a pompous chorale. A real cadence at the end, released; no fade-out. Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra through sfizz.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the mill-race and the wheel, hooves slow and trotting, a hound panting, the cock's wings, leaves and straw, mugs on the robbers' table, the window bursting in, stools flying, the match struck, and the scratch, the bite and the kick of the rout.
The art follows the rule installed five films ago: the narration is cut into 60 beats, one per narrated event, and each beat has its own picture whose prompt names the face of that moment. 51 of the 60 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 donkey running away, the cock crowing on the gate, the four on the road, the music at the window, the crash through it, the scratch, the bite, the kick and the crow from the roof — are continued into motion by Wan 2.2 (18 generations). The narration is the clock: each line's measured duration sets every cut and every bar.
Build time: 18h 27m, unattended.