Hundreds of Beavers is a wild, hilarious, inventive, no-holds-barred slapstick comedy unlike any other movie ever made – and it’s the craziest film of the year by far. Directed and co-written by Mike Cheslik on a shoestring budget of $150,000, Hundreds of Beavers stars Ryland Brickson Cole Tews as a 19th-century applejack salesman named Jean Kayak. When Jean’s farm is destroyed by a group of pesky beavers and he’s stranded in the snowy wilderness, he’s forced to become a fur trapper in order to keep himself warm and well-fed – and he ends up in an all-out war with… hundreds of beavers.
Since it doesn’t have traditional mainstream appeal and its low budget required a lot of painstaking homemade animation to pull off the action sequences, Hundreds of Beavers has taken a long and winding road to the big screen. It was shot across 12 weeks in the winter of 2019 and 2020 and the post-production wasn’t finished until 2022. The movie had its premiere at Fantastic Fest in September 2022 and has popped up at just about every other genre film festival since then. It wasn’t released on VOD until April 15, 2024, and it’s only just coming to theaters.
Hundreds Of Beavers Is Like The Revenant Meets Mr. Bean
It’s both a man-versus-nature frontier epic and a near-silent slapstick comedy
Essentially, Hundreds of Beavers can be described as The Revenant meets Mr. Bean. Like The Revenant, it’s about a man trying to make his way in the harsh American frontier, facing all the brutality that nature has to offer in pursuit of his lost love. But, like Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean, it’s a near-silent slapstick comedy about a bumbling buffoon getting into increasingly absurd antics as he goes about his day-to-day activities. It might sound like these two ideas wouldn’t mesh, but they’re perfect bedfellows in Cheslik’s unique, idiosyncratic take on the proud traditions of visual comedy.
It takes a few minutes to get into Hundreds of Beavers. The opening drinking montage, in which Jean is surrounded by crudely animated drunkards, might have audiences wondering what the hell they’re watching. But once Jean is stranded in the wintry wilderness and has to figure out how to feed himself, it’s off to the races. Then, it becomes a string of increasingly ridiculous slapstick gags that keep building on each other. For the rest of its 108-minute runtime, Hundreds of Beavers doesn’t let up for a second – it’s a hugely entertaining ride.
Hundreds Of Beavers Pays Homage To Classic Cartoons & Slapstick Comedies
It’s like a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon
Hundreds of Beavers is styled as a live-action cartoon, complete with goofy music cues, exaggerated sound effects, and unbridled slapstick violence. Early in the film, Jean makes several futile attempts to catch a rabbit by any means necessary, and these scenes establish the movie as a dark, twisted Looney Tunes cartoon. It’s like Elmer Fudd trying to catch Bugs Bunny, but with a lot more blood.
And Hundreds of Beavers doesn’t just pay homage to Looney Tunes cartoons; it’s also a spot-on tribute to the classic silent comedies of the 1920s and 1930s. If Charlie Chaplin had made The Gold Rush 100 years later, it would look something like Hundreds of Beavers. Like the very best works of Chaplin and Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, Hundreds of Beavers is a masterclass in visual storytelling. It tells the audience exactly what Jean is thinking and what his goals are at every turn without a single word of spoken dialogue.
Hundreds Of Beavers Is Unlike Any Other Movie You’ll See This Year
Hundreds of Beavers is a true original
There have been a lot of great original movies this year, but they often owe a creative debt to previous films. Monkey Man can be compared to John Wick; Longlegs can be compared to The Silence of the Lambs; Abigail is a reimagining of Dracula’s Daughter. Bona fide originality is hard to find in the modern moviegoing landscape. But Hundreds of Beavers is a true original. Its slapstick gags honor the traditions of Looney Tunes, but Looney Tunes was never this crass. Its historical storyline was inspired by The Revenant, but The Revenant doesn’t have extras in animal costumes.
There has never been a movie quite like Hundreds of Beavers; Cheslik wrung every possible gag out of this ludicrous premise. It has a sled chase in the style of a high-speed car chase. It has a kaiju made up of beavers stacked on top of each other. It has beaver versions of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson trying to track down the trapper. Hundreds of Beavers is the kind of movie that’s impossible to describe and has to be seen to be believed.
