It’s easy for a film lover to despair while looking at the current state of the cinematic landscape. Beyond the encroaching contentification (totally a word) of the artform driven by streaming and hastened by AI idiocy, there may never have been a more cowardly, mercenary, craven collective of studio executives as those currently in control of what gets made and how (or if) the finished work gets released.
One need only look at the slate of movies trumpeted at Disney’s recent D23 ‘fan event’ to wonder if what we’re hearing is instead the horns of Judgement Day announcing the end of the artform, fire and brimstone replaced with Uncanny Valley slop and pointless remakes and sequels and spinoffs. Human artistry and a century-old legacy replaced with soulless chum churned out as dictated by an algorithm.
But my nature bends towards optimism, and if you need a reminder of how vital and versatile and alive film and filmmaking can still be, you need only drop a couple bucks to rent Hundreds of Beavers.
Hundreds of Beavers defies easy description, but hey let’s give it a shot anyway.
In the style of silent film (black and white; no dialogue; scratchy, grain-heavy picture), Beavers details the epic contest of survival between hapless frontiersman Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who also co-wrote and co-produced the film) and a hostile wintery wonderland. Even as he braves the terrors of the wilderness, Jean is especially put upon by a clan of aggressive beavers who have staked their own claim on the territory.
It should be noted at this juncture that the beavers, indeed almost all the animals in the film, are played by people in animal mascot costumers.
….
Yeah, I don’t know man, that’s what we’re dealing with here.
What follows is a slapstick ordeal for the ages, as Tews’s Kayak endures a Bruce Campbell-ian amount of punishment and humiliation as he grinds (and grind-quests) his way from zero to hero in the hopes of winning the hand of his lady love (Olivia Graves) and the approval of her domineering father (Doug Mancheski).
Laying out the basics of the plot doesn’t come close to capturing the infectious energy of the thing, the sheer glorious abandon with which Hundreds of Beavers merrily mashes together a vast array of mediums to arrive at something that feels almost unprecedented.
While the look of the film recalls silent cinema, the narrative structure and visual grammar are indebted to video games. And while the gag-a-second pacing puts you in mind of Airplane! and the work of Mel Brooks, the proudly DIY visual effects place Hundreds of Beavers firmly in a contemporary context alongside the zero-budget innovations found on YouTube and TikTok.
It belongs to the past, to the present, to no time besides whatever suits the specific vision of director/co-writer Mike Cheslik (in his feature debut). It contains a command of visual storytelling that is downright masterful and it gleefully indulges in the basest, most simplistic of comedy because holy crap it never does get old watching a full grown man careen head-first into another full grown man wearing a beaver suit.
Honestly, it’s difficult to name a proper precedent for what Cheslik, Tews, and all their collaborators have cooked up here. If Terry Gilliam’s animations ever sprang loose to attack the rest of Monty Python, you might be in the ballpark of the peculiar world being captured here. But how do you create a movie that sits at the exact intersection of Charlie Chaplin and Super Mario? A movie that is simultaneously a master class thesis on the evolving intricacies of the cinematic form AND a rowdy crowd-pleaser with Loony Tunes physics and a penchant for dousing the leading man in goose shit.
No one asked for this.
No could have known to ask for this, excepting of course one of those occasions when someone takes a little too much of something-something and glimpses the firmament of the cosmos and knows truths as yet unborn, but even that guy would probably sober up and go, “Guys in beaver suits? Nah.”
No one was asking these Cheslik and Tews to make this movie, but they decided they wanted it to exist and goddamnit they made it happen.
They scraped together a budget. They trekked out into the winter to shoot in the snow and the cold. They dedicated years to completing the thousands of effects shots in Adobe. Even after the movie was done, it took years to come out because the creative team decided to distribute it themselves rather than trust a buyer to give the film a micro-release before dumping it onto VOD.
After all of that, Hundreds of Beavers is many things.
It’s the funniest movie in years.
It’s a love letter to what movies have been before.
It’s an exhilarating promise of what movies will be.
And maybe most importantly, it’s a reminder that some Wall Street douchebag with a mega-yacht (or mega-yachts, as the case may be) who deletes creativity in exchange for a tax break? That asshole doesn’t get to determine the future of movies. Slick Silicon Valley fucks traipsing around in the Emperor’s latest fit, it’s not up to them either.
There will always be dedicated artists chasing mad visions and working to bring them to life. I hope for a better industry someday that will equip and foster such artists and visions, but maybe that is too much to hope for.
Even so, I trust in the knowledge, with certainty instead of hope, that however hostile the landscape, that’s not going to stop one unreasonable bastard after another from picking up a camera and making magic.
