The film tracks the lives of Wilhelm Grimm, Laurence Harvey and Jacob Grimm, Karlheinz Böhm, two brothers who balance scholarly ambition with a growing love for the folklore they collect. They work to finish a history for a local duke, but Wilhelm’s real passion lies in gathering fairy tales and often uses their funds to hear them told by villagers. As the brothers move between archival work and living folklore, The Dancing Princess and The Cobbler and the Elves braid themselves into the central narrative, hinting at how storytelling fuels the larger project of recording history. The film treats these tales not as mere diversions but as living forces that shape the brothers’ understanding of culture and memory.
In one sequence, a tale is tested in a bookstore when a storyteller reads to three children to gauge whether publishing a collected volume of fairy tales has real merit. The line between manuscript and myth blurs as the narratives echo through the brothers’ daily tasks and inject a sense of possibility into their academic pursuit. The world of stories deepens further with The Singing Bone, told by an old woman in the forest. Wilhelm secretly listens through an open window as the tale unfurls, and the storytelling becomes a catalyst for how the brothers begin to see themselves and their work differently. The film builds toward a striking finale that hinges on a jeweled dragon and the most elaborate use of the film’s practical and visual effects, underscoring how imagination can illuminate truth as powerfully as historical records.
Throughout the course of their work, Wilhelm loses the manuscript that would complete the Duke’s family history, and the brothers falter under the pressure of an impending deadline. They struggle to pay rent, which had been waived in exchange for their labor, and in the scramble to recover the missing manuscript, Wilhelm wades through a stream when his briefcase bursts open and the manuscript slips away. The loss triggers a severe illness—pneumonia—that threatens Wilhelm’s life. While bedridden, he experiences fevered dreams in which numerous fairy-tale figures come to him, pleading to be named before he dies. The fever eventually breaks, and he awakens with renewed resolve, continuing his own research while Jacob begins to contribute more actively to the fairy-tale project, expanding their collaboration beyond the earlier divisions of labor.
As their work accrues broader recognition, the brothers receive an invitation to honorary membership at the Berlin Royal Academy. The invitation, however, feels hollow because it makes no explicit mention of the tales that have long animated their research. Undeterred, they move forward, and a train ride home becomes a turning point: a chorus of children crowds the platform, crying, “We want a story.” Wilhelm begins to speak, setting the stage for what the film declares in its closing moment.
> "Once upon a time, there were two brothers."
The final image lingers on the hopeful note that fairy tales and scholarly history can coexist, and that the brothers’ partnership endures beyond any single publication. The closing caption reiterates the classic fairy-tale cadence: “...and they lived happily ever after,” signaling a gentle verdict about the power of storytelling to endure across time.
