Hundreds of Beavers (4/5)

Hundred of Beavers was written by Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickson Cole Tews (you don’t know them) sometime around 2018. It was shot over the winter of 2019-2020 in Wisconsin with a crew of six. Mike Cheslik directed and Ryland Tews starred. The movie was edited by Mike Cheslik for two years using mainly Adobe After Effects ($22.99/month subscription). The total budget was $150,000. The movie premiered at the Fantastic Fest in 2022, which is a film festival in Austin, TX, that is not SXSW. From there, it hopped from film festival to film festival in 2023. It was released on streaming in April 2024. A select few theaters in NYC showed it for a couple of weeks.

The above storyline you should find intriguing. Because a film made by nobody and coming from nowhere usually doesn’t eventually get to a wide distribution. What usually happens if the movie is bad or even mediocre is that it dies a quiet death before anyone who doesn’t regularly attend film festivals even hears of it. But here “Hundreds of Beavers” is, and it is possible that you can see it. You probably should, simply because it exists and there is nothing else much like it.

Hundreds of Beavers is a slapstick comedy about an apple cider brewer named Jean Kayak that loses his apple groves and applejack liquor business in a catastrophic instance of beaver sabotage. He wakes up in the middle of a snowy winter with nothing and spends the first third of the movie just trying to survive in the wilderness. The movie is in black and white (not deliberate, just cheaper to edit and create special effects) and lacks dialogue (deliberate for purposes of humor). Jean Kayak’s attempts to feed himself resemble the plot of an extended Wile E. Coyote cartoon. He concocts elaborate plans and traps to snare his dinner, rabbits and beavers, which routinely veer off into bizarre and humorous outcomes. The movie employs human actors for all parts, even the rabbits and beavers are played by humans in rabbits and beavers costumes. But beyond that, it is hard to tell what in-frame is real and what is an aftereffect. For practical purposes, the movie may be categorized better as animated.

The second third of the movie plays like a video game in which Jean Kayak reinvents himself as a fur trapper and starts concocting elaborate schemes to kill beavers and sell their pelts to the local merchant in exchange for increasingly valuable prizes (the most valuable of which being the hand of his daughter in marriage, worth "hundreds of beavers"). This part of the movie gets a little tedious, not necessarily because any one part of it is not funny, but because there are too many separate parts. After all, the perfect length of a Looney Tunes cartoon is about five minutes long. This movie is 108 minutes. You can only take so much of this type of fast-paced humor before being gassed. I'm not sure what part should have been cut, but its about 18 minutes too long.

But in the third third, well, that is where the movie truly gets special. For the beavers aren’t just ordinary beavers. They have been chewing through the forest in order to gather enough logs to build something extraordinary on the lake. Indeed, what exactly they are building argues that Jean Kayak’s increasingly systematic harvesting of their pelts amounts to something close to a murderous rampage, if not an outright genocide. When Jean Kayak is Beaver captured, he is even given a Beaver trial and provided a Beaver lawyer. This Beaver society has the rule of law.

There are some truly ingenious scenarios and setups in this movie. The opening song is a lot of fun. The hunting party and the wolves that follow it provide amusing horror/suspense. The merchant’s daughter is a good pole dancer. And I happen to think that men in big beaver costumes are inherently funny, especially so when they are fighting. I eagerly anticipate what Cheslik and Tews could do with a budget. Someone should give them a bunch of money so we can all find out.

I think this movie would make a great double feature with Avatar. Avatar is one of the most expensive movies ever, made by as high-profile of creators as you can get, and has such a self-serious pro-nature bent that it is technically anti-human. Whereas Hundreds of Beavers couldn’t be cheaper, is made by nobodies and is unapologetically, perhaps even unethically, pro-human. The latter would be a great antidote to the former.