Hundreds of Beavers
Hundreds of Beavers
“Hundreds of Beavers” is an extremely erratic nearly a silent picture of a ‘slap spark’ and a non-comic book adaptation of a rare type in which a 19th-century frontier trapper shows defiance toward nature. The expectations raised up by the title are properly fulfilled by the film. As far as I know, this is one of those motion pictures, where there are thousands of beavers. Thousands! 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.’
However, the protagonist, the trapper Jean Kayak (played by Ryland Brickson Cole Tews – I cannot wait to see that name wrapping around a marquee). The activity does not happen until the very last part of the movie. Until that point, Jean’s got his hands full trying to survive in an icy mountain forest what looks like the black and white cartoon of Popeye the sailor man as conceived by an alternate version of “the revenant”. During such handling, on one of the days after exchanging pelts for tools with Doug Mancheski who is a merchant frequented by Jean, the trapper is enchanted with the daughter of the man whom he found quite demure but bold.
It will cost (ta-dum!) hundreds of beaver pelts to marry her. But there is also a love story, rather, a touch of love story as in the videogame “Donkey Kong”.
She is also a writer, a director, an editor and a main visual effects artist all rolled into one—Mike Cheslik has borrowed an idea from all those other filmmakers who give in to the budgetary restrictions instead of fighting it. “There is no self delusion in making these films,” he said in an interview with No Film School. “This how we want to do it, this is a punk lo fi look”. The anthropomorphic animals in this film, beavers and horses, raccoons and skunks and so on, are people dressed in beaver rat and skunk costumes with a zipper at the back. They also have little bulging cartoony pop-sockets for eyes and walk upright (or march or trudge or stroll or skip). There are probably no more than a dozen of the “creatures” on set at any given time, for the entire film budget ($150,000 excluding deferred labor costs) per Cheslik and producer Kurt Ravenwood were spent then how it is one of the best unintentional promotion which advocates making out entire imagination worlds at the price of squat down due to a good concept and turning what is seen as a disadvantage into an advantage.
It is somewhat like an attitude seen in David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’, Robert Rodriguez’s ‘El Mariachi’, and the work of Wes Anderson’s where he showcases as if displaying the grand budapest hotel though more of an actual toy from the toyi.com site and of course the ‘a’ blank is that this is the non-existing building properly speaking. Metaphorical, figurative or plain incorrect images that are done heartfully and ashamed of these are such in their influence that all ‘production quality’ worries are thrown aside and they can connect with the pleasure zones of the inner being. This is a truth that is lost on a great many low aid directed film makers whose aim is primarily to achieve a Hollywood appearance and fall exceedingly short of what was conceived. ‘Hundreds of Beavers’ gets this to a great degree.
With this in mind, the various motions of the people and animals in the movie are as much “realistic” as the iconic of characters that are directly ripped off from “South Park.” And that is why they are funny. Jean climbs some very tall trees, in a position reminiscent of an inchworm. And some times he is bare when climbing such “mountain”. (Do not worry parents, the exposed parts are covered by the log he is grinding out.) It comes as a straw horse which is simply two actors in a horse costume that is not even a costume. They do this by having X’s drawn into the place of their eyes whenever the character or animal is dead. It’s like that Monty Python movie where they could not afford real horses and so the actors pretended to be horseback riders while making hoof steps using pieces of coconut on each other.
As such, Cheslik belongs to the “i don’t care what stupid things i do as long as they make people laugh” brand of comedy filmmakers. The first part consists only of the animated segment and one non-animated character, a junkie named Jean whose life is wrecked because of his applejack alcohol abuse, all the rest is drawn as most underground comic books are eccentric, crude and done with marker pens. Period elements meet modern-day elements in Mel Brooks style humour.
The shop owner’s child tempts Jean by showing a tantalizing portion of her unjust ankle and afterwards moves on to do a pole dance. The beavers put on hardhats while on construction sites and sometimes even wear worker vests. One is shown holding a files of paper. They look like they have invented the concepts of electricity, production line and CCTV.
Cheslik has mentioned Chapman brothers works and cited movie slapstick forms that came before hers – the silent movies of Chaplin and Keaton to the comic two who are Stan Laurel and Olivier Hardy and the Three Stooge series (cited here represented by 2 “detective” beavers for beaver “murders” carried out by Jean; and they are dressed who else but Sherlock & Watson played by L&H beavers). Tews, the high school buddy of Cheslik, a filmmaker too and a super slapstick flinger, manages Cheslik style of plays as wild and intense as diverse as Jim Carrey and Bruce Campbell. It is the design of the poster that is cited in one of the posters released against the film It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World of 1963.
They follow the fictional rules for the most part.
In a way, Jean is thrown in the air as if he is a rocket and continuously manages to survive plummeting from tree tops for lots of meters and surviving getting crushed by huge objects reemerge to keep fighting. An episode in need characters melts from hungry gaze towards the edible object and you see a flash depicting a big drumstick or a slice of pizza and then back to the hungry character.
Video game here is treated as another cohesive stylistic device bringing sense to Jean’s main and side quests. Whenever a similar hero decides that he would want to try to bring home his love and needs to learn how to stay alive, how to catch some animals and skin them to barter with a certain number of pelts, there are constant cutaways to a screen with a layout of trap lines and a number. Instead, it is the episode of the game where the player fights the “big boss”, which is usually the culminating part of the movie.
This is the only normal film that creates this particular film that has none other pencil out clearly defined visual language and seeks people to understand that language feels and moves (and in the end they do). Although tingly, which accompanied “learning” montages in games, logic is the most recent thing among the rest of the proudly old motion influence. Other ‘video game-ish’ great films include ‘Scott pilgrim vs.’ ‘The matrix’ which does not fall far from the last place of paranoia.the World” and “Edge of Tomorrow,” but even more so, “Beavers” commits to that kind of storytelling, at times even seeming to “skip ahead” in a sequence in the manner of a player who impatiently resets a game rather sit through an avatar’s death throes again.
Cheslik’s jarringly frequent cutting away from Jean comes across comically once more. This, however, ends up elevating the pace of the film to a level seem that, perhaps, the screenplay necessitates. If Jean gets wounded on a second occasion because of the same error, as a viewer, you will surely witness a cutaway to another scene but mid-scream, if not earlier persuading you not to feel pity for her.
Here, the dreams are wild, and evasive too but entertaining and exciting, a brain workout that pulls open the thinnest folds of the brain not often at work and gets you to imagine how movies should be, not only how they are now. It is bound to serve as a reassurance to dey future generations of lowkey budget filmmakers. It’s a must see. Great one: a dam fine movie.
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- Genre: Action, Comedy
- Country: United States
- Director: Mike Cheslik
- Cast: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Olivia Graves, Wes Tank, Doug Mancheski, Luis Rico
