“Hundreds of Beavers,” a boldly bizarre, almost silent comedy about a trapper warring with natural forces in the 19th-century and its title is not mere words but it lives up to it. I counted thousands of beavers in this movie. Thousands! And oh my god are they evil creatures! The BADL (Beaver Anti-Defamation League) will be out in force once they get word of this motion picture, which depicts an army of beavers building a dam into a bad guy lair to rival the volcano fortress in “You Only Live Twice” and the title structure of “Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom.”
The hero, trapper Jean Kayak (played by Ryland Brickson Cole Tews – I can’t wait to see that name wrapping around a marquee), doesn’t get in there until the final section of the movie. Until that point, Jean’s got his hands full trying to survive in an icy mountain forest that looks as if somebody reimagined “The Revenant” as a black-and-white cartoon starring Popeye the Sailor Man. During regular visits with a merchant (Doug Mancheski) where Jean exchanges pelts for tools, the trapper falls for the man’s daughter (Olivia Graves), who acts demure but is quite randy. The price of marrying her is (ta-dum!) hundreds of beaver pelts. So there’s a love story, too, kinda like in the videogame “Donkey Kong”.
The film’s writer-director-editor-main visual effects artist Mike Cheslik took his cue from other filmmakers who embrace rather than fight against budgetary constraints. “This is punk lo-fi look,” he told No Film School during an interview “This is our style man.” Those animals that are not humans but shown here as mascots with rear zips are known as non-human mammals—beavers, horses, raccoons, skunks etc.. They have big round Disney-animal eyes and and walk on their hind legs (or march or trudge or stroll or skip).
There were probably less than 12 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 best inadvertent advertisements for the idea that you can create entire worlds on the cheap if you have a strong vision and turn what are usually thought of as liabilities into strengths.
The result is reminiscent of a mindset demonstrated, to wildly different ends, in David Lynch’s “Eraserhead,” Robert Rodriguez’s “El Mariachi,” and the 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 its storybook-ness is precisely why they made it that way.
Figurative images made with love but sketchy can be metaphorical or otherwise have such totemic powers that surpass trivial issues about production values. Too many low-budget filmmakers miss this truth when they strive for a “Hollywood look” but end up making films equivalent to toddlers trying to dunk basketballs. “Hundreds of Beavers” gets it far more deeply than most people realize about this industry.
In this vein, most of the movements of people and animals in the film are no more “realistic” than those of the little cut-out looking characters on South Park. That’s what makes them funny, though. Jean shimmies up and down very tall trees inchworm-like. 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 is a horse that is just two people sharing a “horse costume” which is hardly a costume at all. When a character or animal has died, their eyes become big X marks in place of eyes. Like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where they couldn’t afford real horses so they ran around the English countryside banging coconut halves together to suggest “hoofbeats.”
Cheslik attended the school of comedy filmmaking that says: if it makes me laugh, I’ll do it. The opening part— basically a music video—has one live-action human being named Jean who ends his life due to applejack addiction; illustrations were created with fat-tipped markers like those used for underground comixes by other characters.
It also mixes period-specific facts and customs with modernity Mel Brooks-style. The merchant’s daughter flashes half an inch of ankle at Jean before escalating to pole-dancing. Occasionally beavers will be seen in clothing such as construction hats and neon vests—one even carries a clipboard; apparently they’ve invented electricity as well as video surveillance cameras while perfecting assembly line work.
Among Cheslik’s influences are older forms of movie slapstick including Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton silent films as well as Three Stooges and Stan Laurel/Oliver Hardy comedies from after sound was added (in this case two “detective” beavers looking into multiple “murders” committed by Jean; they’re designed to look like Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson played by Laurel & Hardy played by beavers). Tews, a high school friend of Cheslik’s and a filmmaker himself, is an incredibly precise physical comedian who gives a performance as vivid and fearless as Jim Carrey or Bruce Campbell at their best. The poster is based on one of the posters for the slapstick epic “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” from 1963.
The laws of physics in our world rarely apply to this one. Jean gets shot into the air like a rocket and you think he’s dead after dropping hundreds of feet from trees or being crushed by giant objects but then he pops right back up again and goes for it once more. If they’re starving and see something edible there will be a quick cutaway dissolve showing them fantasizing about the meal: such as, man-sized turkey drumsticks or giant slices of pepperoni pizza.
Here again another unifying stylistic force is video games which shape 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. At its climax, this movie becomes what happens when you reach the “big boss” stage in your game.
This movie is unique in that it invents its own incredibly specific visual language which it assumes people will study until they can speak it (and by the end they do) The most modern touch in an otherwise proudly retro motion set may be found in video gaming logic involved in learning montages
This is why “Beavers,” among other video game-like movies such as “Run Lola Run,” the Matrix franchise, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Edge of Tomorrow, is more dedicated to that form of storytelling; sometimes it even “jumps” forward in a sequence just like if an impetuous player would restart the game instead of watching their avatar go through its death throes again.
Cheslik’s increasingly abrupt cutting-away to something else has a cumulative comic power that makes the totality of the movie even more energetic than it might have otherwise seemed. If Jean gets injured making the same mistake again, there’ll be a cutaway mid-scream, then even earlier during the next scream; the next time you might not get a scream at all, just a cut to the aftermath.
It’s both escapist and imaginative entertainment – an entertaining device for opening up rarely used neural pathways and reflecting on what cinema could be besides what it already is. It will inspire future generations of low-budget filmmakers. It’s one for the ages: a dam fine movie.
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