{"id":1462,"date":"2024-07-30T12:21:21","date_gmt":"2024-07-30T12:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/2024\/07\/30\/hundreds-of-beavers\/"},"modified":"2024-07-30T12:21:21","modified_gmt":"2024-07-30T12:21:21","slug":"hundreds-of-beavers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/2024\/07\/30\/hundreds-of-beavers\/","title":{"rendered":"Hundreds of Beavers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHundreds of Beavers,\u201d a boldly bizarre, nearly silent slapstick comedy about a 19th-century trapper doing battle with nature, exceeds expectations in every way, including the promise of its title. By my count there are thousands of beavers in this movie. Thousands! <\/em>And oh, my goodness, they are nasty buggers. 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.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

The hero, trapper Jean Kayak (played by Ryland Brickson Cole Tews \u2013 I can\u2019t wait to see that name wrapping around a marquee), doesn\u2019t get in there until the final section of the movie.\u00a0Until that point, Jean\u2019s got his hands full trying to survive in an icy mountain forest that looks as if somebody reimagined \u201cThe Revenant\u201d 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\u2019s daughter (Olivia Graves), who acts demure but is quite randy. The price of\u00a0marrying her is (ta-dum<\/em>!) hundreds of beaver pelts. So there\u2019s a love story, too, kinda like in the videogame “Donkey Kong”.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s writer, director, editor, and main visual effects artist Mike Cheslik has taken a page from other filmmakers who lean into budgetary constraints rather than fight them. \u201cThis is a punk lo-fi look,\u201d he said in an interview with No Film School. \u201cThis is our style, man.\u201d The non-human mammals featured in this movie\u2014beavers and\u00a0horses and raccoons and skunks and such\u2014are human performers in mascot suits with zippers up the back. They have big round Disney-animal eyes and and walk on their hind legs (or march or trudge or stroll or skip). There were likely no more than a dozen of the \u201ccreatures\u201d on set at any given time\u2014according to Cheslik and producer Kurt Ravenwood, the entire budget of the film was $150,000, not including deferred labor costs\u2014so what you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

The result is reminiscent of a mindset demonstrated, to wildly different ends, in David Lynch\u2019s \u201cEraserhead,” Robert Rodriguez\u2019s \u201cEl Mariachi,\u201d and the parts\u00a0of Wes Anderson movies where he shows you, let’s say, the Grand Budapest Hotel, and it\u2019s obviously a miniature building on a miniature mountain, and not only is the movie not pretending it\u2019s a real\u00a0structure, the storybook-ness of the image is the point. Figurative, metaphorical or just plain sketchy images made with love and presented with pride have a totemic power that overcomes petty concerns about \u201cproduction values\u201d and plugs into the pleasure centers of the brain. This truth eludes far too many low-budget filmmakers who try for\u00a0a \u201cHollywood look\u201d and sadly achieve the cinema equivalent of a five-year old trying to dunk a basketball. \u201cHundreds of Beavers\u201d understands this on a deep level.<\/p>\n

In that spirit, many of the movements of people and animals in the movie are no more \u201crealistic\u201d than those of the little cutout-looking characters on \u201cSouth Park.\u201d And that\u2019s what makes them funny. Jean shimmies up and down very tall trees, inchworm-style. Sometimes he\u2019s nude when he does it. (Don\u2019t worry, parents; the naughty bits are hidden by the bark he\u2019s scraping against.) There\u2019s a horse that\u2019s blatantly just two performers sharing a \u201chorse costume\u201d that\u2019s barely a costume. You can tell a character or creature has died because their eyes become huge X\u2019s.\u00a0It\u2019s like in \u201cMonty Python and the Holy Grail\u201d where they couldn\u2019t afford real horses so the actors just skipped around the English countryside banging coconut halves together to suggest \u201choofbeats.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cheslik hails from the \u201cif it makes me laugh, I\u2019ll do it\u201d school of comedy filmmaking. The opening section, a musical montage, has just one non-animated character, Jean, whose applejack addiction destroys his life; the rest are drawn in the manner of underground \u201ccomix,\u201d seemingly with fat-tipped markers. Period-specific facts and customs collide, Mel Brooks-style, with modernity. The merchant\u2019s daughter tantalizes Jean with a half-inch glimpse of forbidden ankle, then escalates to a pole dance. The beavers occasionally wear clothes, including hardhats and reflective vests. One is seen carrying a clipboard. They appear to have invented electricity, the assembly line, and video surveillance.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cheslik has cited older forms of movie slapstick as influences, from the silent work of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to the sound-era comedy of The Three Stooges and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (referenced here in the form of two \u201cdetective\u201d beavers investigating the string of beaver \u201cmurders\u201d committed by Jean; they\u2019re dressed to suggest Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson played by Laurel & Hardy played by beavers). Tews, a high school\u00a0friend of Cheslik and a filmmaker himself, is a physical comedian of rare precision, giving a performance as vivid and fearless as the best of Jim\u00a0Carrey and Bruce Campbell. The poster is modeled after one of the posters for the 1963 slapstick epic \u201cIt\u2019s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Real-world laws of physics rarely apply. Jean is shot through the air like a rocket and survives falling hundreds of feet from trees or being crushed by giant objects and pops back up to have another go. When famished characters stare at a potential food source, there\u2019s a brief dissolve and you see that they are imagining a man-sized turkey drumstick or slice of pepperoni pizza. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cHundreds of Beavers,\u201d a boldly bizarre, nearly silent slapstick comedy about a 19th-century trapper doing battle with nature, exceeds expectations in every way, including the promise of its title. By my count there are thousands of beavers in this movie. Thousands! And oh, my goodness, they are nasty buggers. The BADL (Beaver Anti-Defamation League) will …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[36,35,33],"class_list":["post-1462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-movies","tag-action","tag-adventure","tag-comedy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1462\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}