Director: Mike Cheslik (USA). Year of Release: 2022
We start with a quote from St Augustine: “Lord give me chastity, but not yet”, then move straight into a monochrome landscape of falling leaves. A farmer plucks a cartoon apple from a tree. As a drinking tune plays, the collected apples are converted into cider in a hut bearing the name Jean Kayak’s ACME Applejack. Cider is poured and gleefully quaffed. Now seeing double and plagued by beavers eating his brewing equipment, the man balances precariously on a giant cider barrel which crashes into the hut.
Hundreds of Beavers has only just started to get going. The plot is simple to the point of insignificance. Jean Kayak is a trapper somewhere near the Great Lakes. To feed himself, he must kill local wildlife and take the bodies to the local trader. Starting with no equipment in the middle of winter, he manages to catch some fish, which he exchanges for a coin, uses that coin to buy a knife, then an axe, and eventually a gun, which he uses to blast away at the local livestock.
Kayak’s life is a permanent cycle of hunting, shooting, and trading. Each cycle of events concludes with a visit to the trader, who concludes the deal by spitting a wad of tobacco towards a bucket, which he never manages to hit. As the film goes on, the cycle gets larger and larger, like a video game into which he enters new levels with increasing levels of difficulty. Whereas at first Kayak just had to catch a fish, he now needs to hunt down bait which he uses to catch anything he can use to trade.
Kayak draws up a chart of what he can use to attract the different animals which he needs to catch. He needs carrots to trap a rabbit, frogs for skunks, squirrels for dogs, and shit to attract beavers. He also draws a map of the stages he needs to go through to attain booty which he can sell to the trader. This is a framing device used from the earliest computer games to more sophisticated videos, which is able to impose some sort of structure on a film which largely thrives on playful anarchy.
This all sounds like something which might make a slightly entertaining short of about 5 minutes, but little more. The film is repetitive and for most of the time nothing new happens. There is no meaningful dialogue – characters tend to express themselves through grunts. And yet for all this, it is utterly compelling, and keeps our attention for nearly 2 hours. And it does this by relying on a few well-executed gimmicks which sound dull and clichéd, but somehow work in practise.
The first gimmick is that all the characters are played by humans – and not just Jean Kavak and the trader. The various animals which appear – rabbits, beavers and an incredibly shoddy looking pantomime horse are all played by actors in cheap costumes with unnaturally large eyes. When an animal is killed, crosses appear on their eyes. For no apparent reason, several scenes are visited by 2 actors in beaver costumes wearing clothes more usually seen on Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.
This all gives the film the feel of a feature length Looney Tunes cartoon, with attendant pratfalls and unlikely accidents. Another comparison could be to 1920s silent slapstick comedy – one scene appears to be a direct hommage to that Buster Keaton film when the front of house falls down around him. But Hundreds of Beavers is much more ferocious, and Kayak suffers most from this violence, shrugging it off with the stoicism of a Wile E. Coyote.
Another gimmick is the similarity to a video game, not my specialist subject so there’s probably lots that I missed here. As Kayak continues his quest to gather stuff, popups appear on the screen showing the points he has won. In one scene he finds himself chased by a horde of beavers as he tries to balance on a log rushing down an elaborate flume. The log splits in half and both Kayak and one of his beaver pursuers jump from one half to another. The rapid water on which the logs is precariously balancing
So where do the beavers come in? Kayak falls in love with the trader’s beautiful daughter and asks for her hand in marriage (the monochrome filming and cartoon plot give it all an ancient feel which makes requests like this feel relevant). The trader is very reluctant and says that Kayak must first buy a ring from him for which he must pay hundreds of beavers. The cycle of hunting and shooting continues at a faster pace than ever before.
Kayak’s strategy for catching beavers becomes automated – he sets up a sort of Fordist production line, and succeeds in capturing a couple of hundred beavers. This gets him into trouble with the surviving beavers who take him to beaver court which is presided over by a beaver judge. Like so much else in the film, what actually happens is of far less relevance to the mood which you must experience yourself. The hilarious bizarreness from which it gains its power crumbles apart when you try to explain it.
It seems unlikely that reading a simple plot description will encourage anyone to make a point of going to see the film. And I tend to find saying: “you just have to see it for yourself” is the sign of a lazy reviewer. But in this case there’s little alternative as Hundreds of Beavers is pretty much indescribable. Go and see it – you really should – and make your own mind up. And, to be honest, it is not the sort of film that will be loved by everybody. If you see it in the wrong mood, you may very well end up hating it. But go anyway.
Second Viewing – March 2025
When I first saw Hundreds of Beavers, I spent quite a while working out what on earth was going on. Rewatching gives you extra reassurance that you understand (sort of) who is doing what to whom and why. I was better able to pick up hints which were given early on in the film which led to later pay offs. No, I’m not going to tell you what they are. You’re going to have to watch the film (twice) to find out for yourself.
I was also very tired when I saw the film first time round, and rather let it roll over me. It is perfectly fit for that sort of viewing experience – as there is one gag after another, it doesn’t matter if you miss this or that event, as there’s always going to be another one coming soon. Nonetheless, watching it with a bit more attention makes you aware of all the running gags, and that in amongst the extreme chaos, there is much clever and well-structured planning.
Which makes the film’s final 15 minutes or so very jolting. Until then, we’d been moving in ever widening cycles, which included more and more incidents each time round, but always starts and finishes and the trading post where Jean Kayak tries to woo the furrier while her father looks on disapprovingly. He then enters into a new cycle of laying down traps to find bait to overpower creatures that he can bring to the trader and get the chance to flirt with his daughter.
When Kayak enters the beavers’ fortress, this cosy repetitiveness is broken, as the plot becomes more ridiculous and (not sure if this too important in a story which always glories in its silly lack of credibility) less believable. Does this matter? Not really, but there is some sort of disconnect between the body of the film and its ending, just as it was not initially clear what the opening cider factory destruction had to do with what followed.
I guess this is the price you pay for making a feature length version of something which doesn’t seem to have the right to last much longer than a 10 minute cartoon. You need some variety in amongst the familiar monotony. For most of the time this variety is provided by a series of gags which aren’t necessarily clever or unexpected, but they somehow manage to make you laugh out loud every single time (the person who was sitting next to me this time round laughed at loud a Lot).
As we head towards the ending, the jokes become bigger. While they are no more sophisticated than the earlier slapstick (which, like all great cartoon violence, consists of people and animals being struck with implausible force and thrust into the distance), the plot reaches a greater scale, with the beavers uniting together to combine into a single, huge beaver, which strides down the road in pursuit of Kayak like an automated Wicker Man.
In the final sequence, the film makes a vague pass at pointing out that, from a beaver’s point of view, hunting and trapping is not all that great. Kayak is put on trial before a great beaver court where the Holmes and Watson beavers give evidence. For me at least, there is either too much or too little of this. It has a different tone to the general silliness and is not given the time to make a serious point. Like some other parts of the ending, it feels like it belongs to a different film.
Given that Hundreds of Beavers thrives from its general sense of anarchy, none of this is really a criticism. Some scenes work for some people, others don’t. Some feel too long, others too short. This is all perfectly fine. If the film were structured in a way which is satisfying for everyone, it would be much less interesting. I’d rather the makers just tried whatever felt good at the time and half of it worked. And I hope I have an ounce as much fun as they seemed to have had when making it.
CinePhil 