Sometimes there comes along a movie that is so committed to its premise and the bit that you can’t help but love it. It helps even more if that movie is good. HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS is just such a movie, a low-budget marvel that ropes you in with its ridiculous premise and never lets go until the end.
The film follows the plight of Jean Kayak (writer Ryland Tews), an applejack salesman in the 1800s whose orchard is destroyed when beavers chew out one of the legs of his applejack kegs and it rolls down into his house and explodes, setting fire to everything. When he comes to, it is winter and he is hungry. His attempts to catch food are futile and hilarious. Eventually he is successful and manages to catch some fish that he sells to a merchant. There he is taken under the wing of a master fur trapper who teaches him the trade and how to catch all of the animals in the woods, and that there are even more dangerous ones about.
That’s really all I can tell you about the plot without spoiling all of the surprises that the movie has in store. There’s a lot of slapstick, owing to comedies of the silent film era ala Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. A lot of it reminds me of the old Tom and Jerry cartoons I used to watch as well, which no doubt owe their own slapstick to the silent masters. You get some Bugs Bunny in there too, particularly in some bits with a snowman. There also isn’t much speaking. You get some signing at the beginning in a beautiful animated sequence, and after that, it is all pantomime, save for some bits where you get cards with speech on them as you would in a silent film.
One of my favorite parts about the movie is how every animal is either portrayed by a person in a costume (rabbits, raccoons, the titular beavers) or a hand puppet. It just adds to the ludicrousness of it all seeing a bunch of people walking around in beaver costumes, going about their day. This allows them to be anthropomorphized as well, which lets them participate in the slapstick more than they would if you were using real or CGI creatures. Sure a man punching a realistic beaver is funny, but a man punching another man in a beaver costume where its eyes turn to Xs? Pure hilarity.
Written by director Mike Cheslik and Ryland Tews, this zany, madcap comedy is non-stop flow of one gag after another. Not all of them are gutbusters but if you dig their style of humor, you’ll be sitting there with a smile on your face for the entire runtime, which at almost two hours, miraculously never overstays its welcome. That’s the sign of a great comedy. Tews is great as Jean Kayak, able to convey his thoughts without saying a word and making you laugh with just a look.
Just as impressive are the visual effects. There are a ton of little animations and a slew of compositing shots in the film, and it is no surprise that it took two years of post-production to do them. The black and white helps hide a lot of them, no doubt, but even the shots that aren’t seamless only add to the charm.
Also, this fits into my Christmas movie watching as the beginning takes place in December and he mistakes the master trapper for Santa Claus at first. So, bonus!
HUNDRED OF BEAVERS is a zany delight and I implore you all to check it out and bring a little brightness to your day.
