Hundreds of Beavers is a side-splitting masterpiece like no other
By Lisa Laman
Silent cinema rocks. The likes of F.W. Murano, Alice Guy-Blanche, King Vidor, Buster Keaton, and Charles Chaplin didn’t have a choice in working with no dialogue. They had to excel creatively within the technological limits of the early 1900s. Yet within those confines, they created movie magic that’s still dazzling today. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans remains a perfect piece of filmmaking for a reason. Having no access to dialogue inspired ingenuity rather than creative stagnancy. The 2024 comedy Hundreds of Beavers provides a glorious reminder of silent cinema’s charms among many other feats. Who knew the sight of a grown man tussling with people in beaver costumes would fuel one of the year’s most incredible motion pictures?
Writer/director/editor Mike Cheslik (who penned the script with Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) begins Hundreds of Beavers on a small scale. Applejack salesman Jean Kayak (Cole Tews) awakens to find that he's alone and winter has covered the landscape in snow. Now he's got to fend for himself and face off against a slew of feisty wild animals, all of them realized as people in rabbit/beaver/raccoon/dog costumes. Eventually, Jean Kayak begins to get better and better at hunting critters. However, he’s still not adept enough to win over The Merchant (Doug Mancheski) so that he can marry his daughter, The Furrier (Olivia Graves).
What could possibly get him the girl of his dreams? That’s easy: hunting down hundreds of beavers, of course!
It really is the simplest things that can be the funniest. That’s a reality modern comedy films tend to forget about. Think of how many Hollywood comedies (usually courtesy of Paul Feig or Judd Apatow) let scenes go on and on as they suffocate under “hilarious” improvisation. So many words fill up the eardrums of moviegoers. So few giggles escape their mouths. Meanwhile, Hundreds of Beavers, whether by budgetary limitations or the creative instincts of Cheslik and company (maybe both!) get endless belly laughs out of the static faces of the various animal costumes.
This should be a gag that gets old very quickly. However, there’s something so funny about the eyes of these beavers, rabbits, wolves, and other animals often staying the same no matter the situation (save for when they die, then cartoony X’s cover their eyes). Juxtaposing truly surreal scenarios like beavers carried off the ground by a mighty gust of wind with those fixed faces is just hilarious. Plus, you can interpret so much into those adorably blank stares and sparsely designed mugs. It’s like the comedic inversion of how what you don’t see terrifies your imagination in Jaws or Alien. The eye twitches or mouth movements you can’t witness in Hundreds of Beavers have a similar, albeit humor-based, effect.
Those animal costumes are just one of many incredible sources of comedy scattered throughout the movie. Inspired creations like a screaming puppet frog, a sight gag involving a pepper shaker, an ingenious extended sequence involving rabbit footprints, a recurring gag involving Jean Kayak walking across a cartoon map (which would make the “rake gag” proud in how it wrings so many laughs out of never stopping), these and countless other memorable moments are truly a sight to behold. They’re all underpinned by a real sense of craftsmanship going into this low-budget wonder. The best kind of silly comedy has so much love and care put into it. Hundreds of Beavers epitomizes that to a tee.
Cheslik, cinematographer Quinn Hester, and the rest of the cast and crew deliver outstanding work channeling classic silent movies and playing on the hallmarks of old Looney Tunes cartoons. These people have done their homework and then some, they show such effortless mastery of physical comedy. However, they accomplish this without becoming a rigid recreation of Sherlock Jr. or The Gold Rush.
Details like shooting Beavers in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio (compared to the Academy Ratio presentation of many silent comedies), lengthier gags involving things like picking up a coin from a chilly surface (such moments have heavy Adult Swim comedy vibes), or clear influences from video game visuals bring something new to the silent cinema table. Modern filmmaking is dominated by stale echoes of pop culture’s past, including creepy resurrections of deceased actors. Hundreds of Beavers, meanwhile, is a shining beacon of how to tip your hat to yesteryear while making something incredibly fresh.
One of the best examples of this comes from the supporting performance of Olivia Graves as The Furrier. For starters, she's got that same instantly absorbing quality Virgina Cherrill and Janet Gaynor had in the silent film era. With one look at her, you immediately want to follow her story. Excitingly, though, Graves is given a more chaotic comedy to handle than many silent film romantic interests had back in the day. She isn’t around to be a stern straight man to the male protagonist. She’s the one acting ridiculous in things like harvesting the organs of a dead beaver or performing a stealthy pole dancing routine that makes Jean Kayak tug his collar in discomfort.
Graves looks like she could easily slip into a 1920s Harold Lloyd star vehicle without a problem. However, Hundreds of Beavers gives her comedic beats that simply wouldn’t have been possible 100 years ago. Her magnificent performance perfectly distills the beautiful blend of the old and new informing this project's heart. Said heart is also fueled by an astonishing dedication to realizing so many wonderful sights on such a meager budget. 2024 has seen incredibly costly enterprises like Megalopolis enter theaters with all the visual panache of The Amazing Bulk.
Meanwhile, Beavers uses $150,000 and wrings so many glorious, images (a gigantic beaver Gundam!), and gags. Taking visual inspirations from Safety Last or even Rankin-Bass stop-motion specials in some respects means Beavers doesn’t need $100+ million to make cinematic magic. Watching this title, you don't feel budgetary restrictions. There’s just limitless imagination on-screen. Something like a big skirmish between Jean Kayak and a slew of beavers in a cabin (which involves a buzzsaw and lots of packaging peanuts) is realized with such panache, not obvious penny-pinching.
The exquisite visual decisions even extend to this motion picture astonishingly making use of real-world backdrops. Despite occupying such a heightened cartoony realm, Hundreds of Beavers shot many green screen scenes outside. Backgrounds like the interior of a wolf cave, meanwhile, were realized through images captured on real-world drone footage. I had no idea about this filmmaking quality when watching Hundreds of Beavers for the first time, but in hindsight, it does explain why this fictional world is so engaging. There are several shots clearly captured outdoors with natural lighting accentuating the realm’s immersiveness. Tiny details like the authentic way sunshine pokes through tree branches lace the lunacy with some palpable realism. You get all that plus an ingenious evolution of a sight gag where dogs play poker.
Beyond all these outstanding filmmaking qualities, though, Hundreds of Beavers especially succeeds on the most important front: laughs. This movie just keeps on escalating its imaginative insanity and finding ingenious ways to tie recurring gags together. It’s all so clever, inspired, and hilarious. Even typing this review, I find myself chortling over especially memorable sight gags (like a beaver priest hopping into a gigantic grave or our protagonist petting a man in a horse suit) that left me in stitches across my two Beavers viewings. There’s a good reason Hundreds of Beavers is my favorite movie of 2024 so far by a country mile. Filmmaking this incredible and hysterical doesn’t come around often. Treasure those beavers and all their madness.
Hundreds of Beavers is now available on Tubi.