The Brothers Grimm's "The Wishing-Table, the Gold-Ass, and the Cudgel in the Sack" (Tischchendeckdich, Goldesel und Knüppel aus dem Sack) — KHM 36, thirty-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 tailor has three sons and one goat, and the goat lies. Each son in turn takes her to pasture, asks whether she has had enough, and is told "I have eaten so much, not a leaf more I'll touch" — and each evening the old tailor goes down to the stable, asks her himself, and hears "Wherewithal should I be satisfied? Among the graves I leapt about, and found no food, so went without". Three times he takes the yard-measure to a son and drives him out of the house. Then he takes the goat to pasture himself, hears the same lie to his own face, understands what he has done, shaves her head as clean as the palm of his hand and whips her out of the door. The sons, meanwhile, have gone to their trades. The eldest, a joiner, is given a little table that covers itself with meat and wine at a word; the second, a miller, an ass that drops gold at "Bricklebrit"; and each, on the last night before home, sleeps at the same inn, whose host steals the wonder and leaves a worthless twin in its place — so that each son stands before the assembled relations like a liar while a bare table and a common ass do nothing. The youngest, a turner, has been warned by letter. His master gives him a sack with a cudgel in it that leaps out at "Out of the sack, Cudgel!" and dances on the backs of anyone who means him harm. He comes to the inn, boasts of the treasure in his sack, lies down on it, and waits; and when the host creeps up in the night to steal it, the cudgel comes out and beats him until he gives back the table and the gold-ass. The three sons go home together, the gold falls like a thunder-shower, the table spreads itself at last, the kinsmen feast till far into the night, and the tailor locks away his needle and thread and lives with his sons in joy and splendour. And the goat? Ashamed of her bald head, she hid in a fox's hole; the fox, the bear and at last a bee found two great eyes shining in the dark — and the bee's sting sent her out into the world as if mad, and to this hour no one knows where she has gone.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), unabridged: all 3,815 words, every sentence verbatim and in order — the longest film in the series by a factor of four. Twelve voices on six bases: a narrator who tells a village comedy with a straight face; the old tailor, fond and furious and shocked and glad; the goat, smug when fed and whining when she lies; three sons who are three different young men — the eager joiner, the hearty miller, the cool turner; the floury miller's master and the slow turner's master; the oily innkeeper who ends up howling for mercy; and the bear, the fox and the bee. The one change this film: the narration's pauses are placed where the meaning turns, not where the commas are.
The score is a rustic theme-and-variations with a homecoming rondo, for chamber orchestra. The goat's verse is a nursery tune in G major that turns to G minor every time she lies, one voice heavier each lie — oboe; then a bassoon in canon; then a clarinet with the tune upside down; then the whole string section in augmentation over a timpani pedal for the lie to the father's face. The yard-measure is a set of marcato blows that grows by one blow per son. The journeymen's road is a Wanderlied in F on each son's own instrument, and the homecoming cadence in the father's C major is deceptive twice — a sour bassoon fall as the table stays bare and the ass drops nothing — and lands only the third time, tutti. Each wonder has its own sound: the table a harp arpeggio blooming into a shimmer on string harmonics and a high flute; the gold-ass a glockenspiel cascade in E-flat with harp and pizzicato; the cudgel a xylophone-and-wood-block tattoo and a jig in D minor on marcato strings. The innkeeper creeps on chromatic pizzicato basses. The coda is the goat's: her tune haunting the fox's hole on the low bassoon, two shining eyes as a high tritone on violin harmonics, the bear on the tuba, the bee a flute trill, the sting one pizzicato sforzando — and her tune running off in G major, faster and higher, into a tutti cadence, one more bleat, and the last sound a single tap of the wood block. Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra through sfizz; no fade-out.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the goat's trot and her browsing, the cord and the knots, the stable steps, the whistle and slap of the yard-measure, the razor and the lather, the whip, the joiner's plane, the little table set down and strapped on, the cloth and crockery and glass of the table covering itself, knives and tankards, the host's bare feet creeping, the mill, the ass's hoofs and bridle and snort, coins on a counter, the stable bolt, the rain of gold on a cloth, the turner's lathe, the letter, the sack and its thump, the cudgel's whistle and its whacks, the fall, the thunder-shower of gold, the feast, the press locked, the fox's paws, the bear's tread, the bee's buzz and the sting, and the goat's hoofs running off over the hills.
The art follows the rule installed fourteen films ago: the narration is cut into 233 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 — the goat's smug and whining faces, the tailor's fondness turning to fury four times and to shock once, the sons' honest, proud and ashamed faces, the innkeeper's greed and his howling. Motion is the default: 170 of the 233 shots are animated by Wan 2.2 (332 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 goat is the third character built under the body-traits rule, and the first animal: from the razor on she has her own character sheet with her head shaved smooth and pink, and the vision model checks every picture of her for it. The narration is the clock: each line's measured duration sets every cut and every bar.
Build time: 83h 32m, unattended.