A black and white silent slapstick film in 2024? From the opening sequence, it’s clear that Hundreds of Beavers is going to be, if nothing else, like no other movie you’ll see this year and probably ever.
The film follows Jean Kayak, an applejack salesman who in the opening song and dance loses his applejack supply and his orchard, forcing him to brave the cold, snowy frontier and learn to survive.
Luckily for us, that comes by way of gag after gag as Kayak tries to figure out how to go about trapping a variety of animals from rabbits to, of course, beavers. And to great comedic effect, these animals are played by people in animal costumes, providing plenty of Looney Tunes style antics—for instance, there’s a running gag of Kayak’s hunger having him visualize his prey as food, starting as a sensible visual of meat on bone but becoming as absurdly divorced from their source as visualizing fish as swimming ice cream cones or geese flying overhead as a formation of pretzels.
This is a film that builds on itself, introducing a rule in one gag and quickly returning to either reinforce or subvert that rule in the next gag and so on and so forth.
There is a point for myself and several others I’ve chatted with where this repetition becomes a slight chore in the second act. This may be the only film in history that you could say hits a slump between its opening credits and its title card.
I think a certain aspect of the film that is shown in its entirety could have been sped up a bit through a montage of sorts, shaving off maybe 15-20 minutes of the movie’s 108-minute runtime, but then again, the creators of the movie acknowledged that they wanted to show that segment in full and kudos to them, as it certainly served to make their work that much harder.
But even in that slow time, there are still many funny gags to string you along and it eventually leads to a ridiculous, glorious conclusion that stretches cartoon logic to the limits and lets everything that came before find its payoff.
This is a movie untainted by Hollywood or studio interference. This is just a couple of dudes looking to make a snowy slapstick comedy and doing it themselves on a $150K budget and access to Adobe After Effects. The director, Mike Cheslik, crafted over 1,500 effects shots for this film on his home computer over the past four years to bring this to life and that passion really shines through in the finished product.
If you enjoy silent films like the works of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, a good Looney Tunes cartoon, and/or old-school video games there’s a lot here to love and it’s worth your time to see Kayak go from bumbling buffoon to a man who can take on, well, hundreds of beavers.
