‘Hundreds of Beavers’ and What Even Is Reality, Anyway
This kind of exhausting comedy is either the greatest thing you’ve ever seen or the most bizarre or both or maybe neither and what did I just watch?
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I WOULD totally understand if you assumed Hundreds of Beavers was a porn film, or maybe one of those 1980s-era teen comedies1. It is neither of those things. What it is is a little harder to describe. It’s a black-and-white indie film with almost zero dialog that is simultaneously a homage to Buster Keaton, platform video games, and Looney Tunes2. It’s grasp of pacing and plot is frustrating at best, it’s maximalist approach to sight gags is overwhelming3, and it involves what might be the most AfterEffects processing ever in the history of film. And ... it’s kind of actually funny?
Let’s back up.
Hundreds of Beavers was conceptualized by Ryland Brickson Cole Tews4 and Mike Cheslik in 2018. Over twelve weeks in 2019 and 2020, they spent $150,000 filming it in Michigan and Wisconsin, and they released it in 2022. It has five human characters and hundreds of animal characters depicted by people wearing human-sized animal costumes (thanks to digital magic, many of the animals are depicted by the same people over and over again). The story is both simple and ludicrously convoluted5: Jean Kayak (Tews) is a 19th century applejack (he has an orchard and makes hard cider). While getting absolutely blitzed on his own supply one day, some beavers come and sabotage his enormous tanks of alcohol, resulting in the total destruction of his orchard.
Kayak wakes up in the middle of winter, and spends a long time trying to catch something to eat. The rabbits, raccoons, beavers, and fish all around him largely ignore his incompetent efforts, and he suffers humiliation after humiliation as he fails to catch anything. When he does finally secure a fur, he goes to the local Merchant (Doug Mancheski) and meets his comely daughter, the Furrier (Olivia Graves) and the Master Fur Trapper (Wes Tank). Eventually, the Trapper takes Kayak on as an apprentice, and after the Trapper is killed by wolves (who have hilariously eaten every single one of his dogsled team one by one6), Kayak takes over his territory and begins to have some success. Feeling established, he asks the Merchant for the Furrier’s hand in marriage, and is informed that to get his blessing he must first bring the Merchant hundreds of beavers. What follows is an orgy of beaver murder as Kayak comes up with endlessly, creatively brutal ways to kill beavers7.
ESCALATING RIDICULOUSNESS
It’s difficult to convey the tone and utter insanity of this film without visuals, so here’s a scene depicting Jean’s bizarre, failed attempts to catch a rabbit for dinner:
That barely scratches the surface. Every moment of this film is filled with pratfalls, sight gags, and bizarreness. Rabbits, Jean, and beavers fall down every time they try to run. Graphics appear on the screen like a video game8. There’s a lot of poop—a lot of poop. It’s either hilarious or tedious depending on your sense of humor and tolerance for old-timey cartoony hijinx (full disclosure: I found myself laughing more than I expected; something about the sound effect they play every time Jean falls into a hole just cracked me up).
From a writing standpoint, it’s kind of a disaster; the first half-hour plus is an extended prologue, the section where Jean (slowly) learns how to murder all manner of creatures goes on way, way too long, and the central conflict and goal for the protagonist isn’t introduced until near the end. This film will not be appearing in any “how to plot” tutorials.
But, of course, that ain’t the point. The point is the escalating ridiculousness, leading to the film’s final chapter when Jean infiltrates the enormous wooden complex the beavers have erected on the river, seeking to retrieve several dozen beaver corpses that the beavers reclaimed from him and seek to bury. Shot like a platformer video game, this sequence includes the revelation that the beavers have a) advanced wood-based technology and are about to launch a spaceship and b) have the ability to join together like Voltron to form an enormous Super Beaver9.
Like I said: Escalating Ridiculousness.
The World, Built
What’s interesting from a writer’s POV is how much effort they put into the world-building. The sequences where Jean fails to catch any food, learns to trap, and then goes on his beaver-murdering rampage are very, very long, but they do serve to map Jean’s little world in meticulous detail (with literal map appearing on the screen as Jean learns the trapping ropes). The world is persistent, too, with the environment changing unexpectedly as Jean returns to various locations—often his traps are empty, but mysterious shapes have been imprinted in the snow, hinting at later revelations.
By the time Jean is inside the Beaver Mega Complex, the viewer has a very—surprisingly—deep understanding of the world he inhabits10. The physics are very cartoony, of course, but this is a world where all the animals are obviously people in costumes, including one hilariously stoic man dressed as a horse, so that’s to be expected. What’s great about the approach here is that you get all this world-building during these overlong sequences but you’re never bored because of the never-ending assault of sight gags. When we first meet the Fur Trapper, for example, his team of dogs (humans in costumes, of course) are in the background by his sled doing stretches and lunges. When Jean does manage to trap a rabbit, he is usually beaten to it by a bunch of raccoons who eat everything except the trapped leg; when Jean learns to elevate his trapped rabbits there are shots of frustrated Raccoons making the absolute worst jumps ever seen in an attempt to steal the rabbits. When Jean finally kills one of the raccoons, the Furrier makes him a ridiculous suit out of it, including a comically oversize hat from the raccoon’s head11:
It’s a surprisingly deeply-imagined fictional universe, is my point. Assuming you even notice considering the barrage of jokes being thrown at you.
Should you watch Hundreds of Beavers? That depends. Does a mashup of Bugs Bunny, Benny Hill, and Buster Keaton sound good to you? Then, yes. Does the idea of a grown person in a bunny suit doing a pratfall in the snow amuse you? Then, also yes12.
One thing this film does prove beyond a shadow of a doubt: I am not a complex or erudite person13.
NEXT WEEK: Nu-nu Doctor Who tries for unearned pathos.
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Let me be clear: It is not the title of my memoir.
It is exactly the sort of film me and my friends would have made in the 1990s if we’d had digital tools to work with and any sort of work ethic whatsoever. Which we did not.
This describes me, as well, which is why I have no friends. Well, one reason why.
Fellow fiction writers take note: Now that’s a name.
Sort of like all my answers to the question “Good god, man, where are your pants?”
In a prime example of the Beetlejuice “it keeps getting funnier every time I see it” school of humor, the repetition of a “dogs playing poker” visual gag eventually wears you down and becomes absolutely hilarious, especially when the final surviving dog is shown playing solitaire.
Luckily, the film makes sure to depict the beavers as kind of assholes, so you don’t feel too bad about this.
For some reason I would pay money to have the ability to display a huge glowing exclamation mark over my head every time I was surprised.
I’m not sure if Voltron is still a cool and hip cultural reference.
As usual, I am incapable of discussing anything important with a any degree of sophistication, but I can now tell you anything you want to know about the universe of Hundreds of Beavers. This is the opposite of a superpower.
Honestly, it’s like a silly, ridiculous Mad Max universe, and it kind of shockingly works.
I mean, of course that’s funny. It’s just science.
Also: Not a serious person.
Your article was interesting. Thanks for writing it. But after watching the video clip of Hundreds of Beavers, it seems much more slapstick than my tolerance for slapstick humor allows. I prefer your article to the video clip. Thanks.