Hundreds of Beavers
“Hundreds of Beavers” is a completely wild, almost mute slapstick comedy about a 19th-century trapper at war with nature and that’s not just according to the title. I think there are thousands of beavers in this movie. Thousands! And boy, they’re nasty little buggers. The BADL (Beaver Anti-Defamation League) is going to be all over this one when they hear about it an army of beavers builds a dam into a bad guy lair that’s got nothing on the volcano fortress in “You Only Live Twice” or the title structure of “Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom.”
The hero, trapper Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews I can’t wait to see that name wrap around a marquee), doesn’t even really get into it until the final third. Until then, buddy, Jean’s just trying to survive in an icy mountain forest that looks like somebody reimagined “The Revenant” as a black-and-white cartoon starring Popeye the Sailor Man. He spends some quality time with a merchant (Doug Mancheski) who he trades pelts for tools with and falls in love with the man’s demure seeming but secretly randy daughter (Olivia Graves). The price for marrying her is (ta-dum!) hundreds of beaver pelts. There’s also sorta kinda like in “Donkey Kong” a love story.
Writer director editor main visual effects artist Mike Cheslik has taken his cues from other filmmakers who embrace budgetary constraints rather than fight them. “This is a punk lo-fi look,” he told No Film School in an interview. “This is our style, man.” The non-human mammals in question here beavers and horses and raccoons and skunks and such are human performers wearing mascot suits up-zipped in the back. They have big round Disney animal eyes and walk on their hind legs (or march or trudge or stroll or skip).
There were likely no more than a dozen of the “creatures” on set at any given time according to Cheslik and producer Kurt Ravenwood, the entire budget of the film was $150,000, not including deferred labor costs so what you’re looking at is one of the finest accidental advertisements ever made for the idea that you can create entire worlds cheap if you’ve got a strong vision and turn what are usually thought of as liabilities into strengths.
The result is akin to something seen in David Lynch’s “Eraserhead,” Robert Rodriguez’s “El Mariachi,” or those parts of Wes Anderson movies where he shows you, let’s say, the Grand Budapest Hotel, and it’s obviously a miniature building on a miniature mountain, and not only is the movie not pretending it’s a real structure, but also the storybook ness of it all is kind of the point.
Figurative/metaphorical/just plain sketchy images made with love and presented with pride have a totemic power that overcomes petty concerns about “production values” and plugs directly into pleasure centers. This truth evades far too many low-budget filmmakers who try for a “Hollywood look” and sadly achieve something closer to cinema’s equivalent of watching a 5 year old try to dunk. “Hundreds of Beavers” understands this deep down.
In that spirit, many of the movements of people and animals in the movie are no more “realistic” than those of the little cutout looking characters on “South Park.” And that’s what makes them funny. Jean shimmies up and down very tall trees, inchworm style. Sometimes he’s nude when he does it. (Don’t worry, parents; the naughty bits are hidden by the bark he’s scraping against.)
There’s a horse that’s blatantly just two performers sharing a “horse costume” that’s barely a costume. You can tell a character or creature has died because their eyes become huge X’s. It’s like in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” where they couldn’t afford real horses so the actors just skipped around the English countryside banging coconut halves together to suggest “hoofbeats.”
Cheslik hails from the “if it makes me laugh, I’ll do it” school of comedy filmmaking. The opening section, a musical montage, has just one non-animated character, Jean, whose applejack addiction destroys his life; the rest are drawn in the manner of underground “comix,” seemingly with fat tipped markers. Period-specific facts and customs collide, Mel Brooks style, with modernity. The merchant’s daughter tantalizes Jean with a half-inch glimpse of forbidden ankle, then escalates to a pole dance. The beavers occasionally wear clothes, including hardhats and reflective vests. One is seen carrying a clipboard. They appear to have invented electricity, the assembly line, and video surveillance.
Cheslik has cited older forms of movie slapstick as influences on his work such as Charlie Chaplin’s silent films or Buster Keaton’s sound era comedies but also Three Stooges’ physical comedy or Laurel & Hardy’s detective roles played by beavers who investigate “murders” committed by Jean dressed like Sherlock Holmes and Watson. Tews, a high school friend and filmmaker himself, is compared to Jim Carrey or Bruce Campbell in terms of performance skill and fearlessness. The poster was inspired by one for “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” from 1963.
Real world laws of physics rarely apply. Jean is shot through the air like a rocket and survives falling hundreds of feet from trees or being crushed by giant objects and pops back up to have another go. When famished characters stare at a potential food source, there’s a brief dissolve and you see that they are imagining a man-sized turkey drumstick or slice of pepperoni pizza.
Another unifying stylistic force here is the video game, which gives shape to Jean’s quest and sub quests. As the hero tries to learn how to survive, trap, and rack up pelts to win the hand of his love, there are regular cutaways to a map of trap lines and a numeric ticker showing his progress. The film’s climax is the part of a game where a player battles the “big boss.”
This is a rare movie that invents its own incredibly specific kind of visual language and expects the audience to study it and become fluent (and by the end, they have). The video game logic of the “learning” montages is the most modern touch in an otherwise proudly retro motion set of influences.
“Beavers” is also one of the most video game-ish movies ever made, but it’s even more or perhaps less than that. There are times when it seems to skip ahead in the sequence, like a player who’d rather reset the game than watch his avatar die again.
The comedic potential of Cheslik’s increasingly abrupt cutaways to something new each time gives the movie an energy beyond what its parts ought to add up to. If Jean gets hurt making the same mistake a second time, there’ll be a cutaway mid-scream and then an earlier one during the next scream; maybe next time you don’t get a scream at all, just this scene.
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