“It is always hard to see the purpose in wilderness wanderings until after they are over.” —John Bunyan, as quoted in Hundreds of Beavers
“Well… That was exhausting.” —Me, after my first screening of Hundreds of Beavers
Wherein a once-successful applejack vendor, having been laid low by dastardly beavers, must build a new life for himself by becoming a successful trapper, thwarting the surprisingly ambitious plans of his buck-toothed adversaries, and winning the hand of the merchant’s comely daughter (who’s also a skilled and unflappable furrier and a none-too-shabby pole dancer).
Yes, it’s an epic tale of the frozen north, although not quite as north as is usually implied—Wisconsin and Michigan are the general areas, here, although the iniquitous beavers do spout their gibberish with a distinct French accent. And if that was all, we wouldn’t be hanging around here musing about it. But there’s more to the comedy Hundreds of Beavers than its logline would suggest.
Let me digress for a second. I have to admit, I tend to take an annoyingly entitled attitude when people who are not deeply into SF offer their opinions of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Too often the observations go something like, “I tried to watch it, and got bored.” To which my admittedly snotty response is, “That’s ‘cause you’re watching it wrong.” By which I mean: On a flat-screen in the living room with the lights on and a smartphone or tablet close to hand. Nope, the only way to watch it—short of theatrical presentation—is in a darkened room, with the largest screen available, a powerful sound system, and all devices at least turned off, if not buried in the backyard. No fridge runs; empty your bladder before sitting down and stockpile your snacks before hitting play. This is a film that demands your full attention; you have to commit.
This, of course, is a level of effort that most people don’t anticipate when watching a film. Moviegoing is presumed to be a passive activity: You sit in the darkness and let the images wash over you. Nothing wrong with that, it’s only natural to want the storyteller to lead you to their tale’s final destination.
But not all films are like that. Some require active, intellectual engagement. You may still be sitting cozy in your seat with your soda and popcorn handy (personally, I prefer just a box of Junior Mints), but the filmmaker has the right to make engagement mandatory, inviting you to work with them. Such a film is 2001. Another, it turns out, is Hundreds of Beavers.
As you might divine from my quote up top, I did not come out of my first viewing of Hundreds of Beavers in love with the movie. In fact, I was reasonably certain I hated it. This confused me, not just because I was aware of the praise that was being heaped on the film from all corners, but because the evidence of my own eyes indicated what an impressive work it was. Operating off a meager budget—per IMDB, $150,000—writer/director Mike Cheslik and co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews (who also plays our beleaguered protagonist, the applejack vendor Jean Kayak) not only endeavored to recreate the anarchic comedy of the silent era, but to conjure up a frankly stunning visual experience. Taking advantage of all the tools available to the digital filmmaker, Cheslik creates a stark, snow-crusted, black and white world that incorporates references ranging from Chaplin, Keaton, and Méliès, all the way to the likes of Jim Henson, artist Edward Gorey, and Czech fantasy director Karel Zeman. It’s an unabashedly stylized world, where media gets mixed with wild abandon: live-action, animation, CG, model work, anything that will help get a laugh.
And the experience that results is, in fact, stunning. Unfortunately, during my first crack at the film, I came out of it feeling that that was for better and worse. Somewhere in the middle of Kayak’s adventures, during an extended sequence where he follows a circuit of snares that allow him to become a successful trapper, I felt overload set in. In the moment, I couldn’t tell why it was happening, just that my brain was going, I’m working really hard here, Dan. I did stay with the film to the end. I laughed, a lot. But a wall had gone up, and for all the goodwill I put into the effort, it was a chore getting through it to the end.
Note those terms, though: “chore;” “work.” I went into Hundreds of Beavers with an expectation: That a 21st century reincarnation of silent comedy—with tons of slapstick, where the protagonist’s animal adversaries are portrayed by actors in off-the-shelf mascot suits—was not going to require a lot of thinking. In short, I was making the same mistake that I had callously applied to people who weren’t taken with 2001: I was watching Hundreds of Beavers wrong.
My reappreciation began with the woodpecker. Early in the film, after the beavers have destroyed Kayak’s cider works and the hapless salesman is left abandoned in the woods and struggling for survival, he stumbles upon a nest of woodpecker eggs left unprotected in a tree. Climbing up onto the branch, he beholds the cache of prospective foodstuffs and, overjoyed at his discovery, delivers a jaunty little whistle. Big mistake. The sound immediately summons Mama Woodpecker, who drives Kayak from his perch by pecking at his head. This turns into a running gag: Kayak, having achieved some sort of success, celebrates by whistling, at which point the woodpecker—by some mysterious, cosmic mechanism—would materialize, deflating the man’s triumph by literally punching a hole in his noggin.
And if it was just that running gag, it would have been enough for me—I giggled every time it happened. But Cheslik doesn’t leave it at that. He has Kayak eventually discover that it’s not his head the bird is attacking, it’s his “coonskin cap” (actually a cartoonish racoon mascot head with a couple of X’s painted on the eyes). And so, when Kayak tries to raid a wolves’ lair, he sets up an emergency escape system that tethers him to a trigger baited with that cap. When the wolves threaten to attack, he delivers his jaunty whistle, and in comes the woodpecker to assault the headgear, setting off the mechanism and pulling the trapper’s ass out of danger.
So something that at first seems merely funny ultimately becomes a bit of rather sublime storytelling. When I came to that revelation, the true nature of Hundreds of Beavers unfolded before me: It’s a comedy that’s filled not with gags, but with guns… Chekhov’s guns specifically, the idea that if you show a weapon in the first act, it has to be fired by the third.
Cheslik deploys that mechanism over and over: Watching Kayak plunge repeatedly down a snow-camouflaged hole is funny for its abrupt randomness, but it also leads to the moment when the trapper realizes the holes are actually portals to a subterranean beaver escape system that needs to be plugged if he’s to have any success. When the beavers gnaw the supports out from under Kayak’s giant applejack casks, it appears they’re just being assholes. When we later discover that one of the casks has been turned into a crucial component of the beaver’s space program (sure, why not?), it makes a kind of nonsensical sense.
Cheslik has said that Hundreds of Beavers is structured after video games. There are lots of indicators of that: the circuitous map that gets displayed and filled out as Kayak makes his trapping rounds; a scorekeeping graphic that pops up to keep track of the number of critters he’s subdued; the menu board above the merchant’s counter that illuminates items available for trade, complete with 8-bit sound effects. But most pertinent to our discussion, the film replicates the mechanics of a cause-and-effect roleplaying game, the kind where you stumble upon an acorn in one part of the woods, and take it to another part to lure a squirrel out from the hole where it’s guarding the key that will open the castle gates. (Is that something that actually exists? I just made it up.) Few of Hundreds of Beavers’s gags are there just to be there; they’re all part of a puzzle that can only be fully appreciated once it’s pieced together.
One of a filmmaker’s secret superpowers is understanding how an audience will watch a film, how they will ascribe levels of high importance to some things, and dismiss others. If the artist is cunning enough, they can turn those priorities on their heads. This runs through the entire history of film. Robert Donat may mindlessly whistle a tune (just as jaunty as Kayak’s, BTW), only to eventually discover that it’s the key to the mystery of The 39 Steps. Bruce Willis may continually be distracted from opening a door, but that minor detail gains impact when the patented Shyamalan “twist” is revealed at the end of The Sixth Sense. And Denis Villeneuve may leverage an audience’s innate understanding of how editing portrays time in a film and use that presumption to allow Arrival to provide insights into how we look at our pasts, and what we take away from them.
Stand two inches away from a Seurat painting, and all you get is a flurry of colored dots. Focus too much on the trees, and you miss the meaning of the forest. (Fitting analogy there, no?) It is not a sin to assume that a comedy film will just be a string of gags from start to end—some of the greatest examples of the genre follow this format. But even within comedy—stand-up specifically—there’s the concept of the callback, insinuating the punchline of a previous joke somewhere into the latter portion of a set. It provides context and coherence to the routine, and makes it greater than just a catalogue of snappy one-liners.
Hundreds of Beavers is non-stop funny, but it’s never just a laugh for laugh’s sake. It teems with details—many, if not all of which one has to track to fully appreciate what’s going on. I wasn’t prepared for that level of work on my first viewing, and so felt overwhelmed. Given time to reflect, I was able to step back and appreciate the full tapestry of the work. Cheslik had achieved something distinctive: allowing us to celebrate the forest and relish each, individual tree. On a meager budget and with a coat-rack full tacky costumes (you can see the zippers!), he’s not only created something hilarious, but brilliantly complex. You come for the laughs, and leave having your mind blown.
Okay, okay, I know it’s a crime to deconstruct comedy, taking something visceral and instinctive and applying mundane logic to it. I had to, in this case, to figure out why my outlook on a film went from negative to amazed. I am willing in my chagrin to concede that I may be the only one in the world who did not get Hundreds of Beavers at first shot. You probably did, and if so, I’d like hear about your journey with the film. Or if you know of other comedies that turn out to be much more than their billing or basic premise, I’d like to hear of them. We have the comments section below; be brave and stalwart in your offerings, but also friendly and kind. If we turn against each other, the beavers win.
