Like the main character in it, Hundreds of Beavers just keeps going, throwing gag after gag after gag at an audience you suspect it suspects will only yield if buried. It works.
It’s a semi-cartoon – its looks and its approach to the laws of physics – about a 19th-century applejack (hooch made from apples) salesman who destroys his career to the accompaniment of a cheerful song in the film’s opening moments. Applejack factory exploded, apple orchards all in flames thanks to a freak accident, Jean Kayak is left alone in the snowy wastes of North America – no food, no gear, no prospects. But instead of laying down and dying he sets to work, trying to catch rabbits, then fish, before settling on beavers, who seem to have a monopoly on all the good stuff in these here parts. And by dint of enthusiasm and gumption he builds back better, striking up a grudging relationship with the local trader (Doug Mancheski borrowing mightily from silent star Ben Turpin) and letting his eye rest on the trader’s comely daughter (Olivia Graves).
It would work done straight, like an episode of Grizzly Addams perhaps, but first-time director Mike Cheslik and his writer Ryland Tews (who also plays Jean Kayak) instead do it almost as a silent movie, in black and white, with jaunty cartoon stylings layered on in post-production, which took two years. Barely any dialogue, mostly grunts. A soundtrack cobbled together mostly from library music. Cheslik battled for four years to raise the money for the film, clearly a labour of love, but instead of being hampered by a low budget makes the most of the film’s impoverished looks. It’s an aesthetic – you might not like it but it’s consistent. The beavers, for instance, are men in furry sports mascot suits, and so are the rabbits, and the wolves, when they eventually show up.
I should say wabbit rather than rabbit. The spirit of Looney Tunes presides over this mad porridge, and of Buster Keaton. Cheslik and Tews explicitly borrow several of Keaton’s best sight gags – the house front falling down and the sole man being pursued by hundreds of brides (beavers), for instance, are from Steamboat Bill Jr and Seven Chances respectively.

There’s even eventually a story of sorts, about the merchant, reluctant to part with his only daughter, setting Jean off on an impossible fairytale quest – bring me hundreds of beavers and you may have her – which leads to the film’s crazy-busy finale. And while all this is going on, two beavers, one in a deerstalker hat and smoking a pipe, the other his sidekick in bowler hat, stalk Jean, trying to put a face to the trail of destruction they’re following.
Jean Kayak is like Wile E Coyote in most respects – crazy gadgets aplenty, physical danger no impediment – but unlike him in one key detail: he actually gets good at catching his quarry.
Which brings us to the film’s strange and refreshing quirk. It is not squeamish about killing – fish, rabbits, dogs, wolves and beavers die in their scores as Jean ploughs his lonely furrow, which is a metaphor for the white man’s exploitation of pristine America, if you like, or just more Bugs Bunny-style referencing, if you don’t.
Little side gags, like another trapper’s team of dogs (again, men in mascot costumes), constantly pissing and humping anything static, mean there’s usually something to be amused by in the background if Jean Kayak’s increasingly surreal antics in the foreground begin to wear thin (some jokes are recycled several times). And there’s a running gag about a spittoon that becomes increasingly elaborate.
This is one of those films where, in the credits, the same names keep recurring. Family members have been drafted in. It’s been stitched together like a patchwork quilt. The world needs more of them. Hundreds more beavers.
Hundreds of Beavers – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024