Blogging By Cinema-light: Hundreds of Beavers

Friday, May 3, 2024

Hundreds of Beavers

Beavers and Butting Heads

Frankly, My Dear, I'm Gonna Build a Dam!

Doldrums. You get stuck in them and circle around not making any progress. This kind of drudgery can lead to a lack of enthusiasm, depression (if it goes too far), and the missing of posting opportunities because...meh...why bother? It makes you do things like take a negligible romp such as The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare and try to apply some critical rigor to it. Such activity should be punished by writing 100 times on a blackboard the old Alfred Hitchcock line "Ingrid, It's Only a Movie!"

The solution, of course, is to slap yourself around a little, get the hell out of your rut and do something different. Take a chance.

Like going to your local art-house theater to see a movie that looks so nuts and so juvenile that any attempt at critical pretentiousness is a completely pointless exercise.

Such a movie is Hundreds of Beavers, a sort of mixed-media "Looney Tune" of live action and anything else that could be thrown onto the screen, be it animation, stop-motion and line-drawing, CGI, green-screen, puppets, people in costumes, and what-not ("what-not" encompassing things I couldn't figure out—it goes by so fast!). None of it is done with what you would call "finesse," feeling at times that it has the technical look of a "Clutch Cargo"® cartoon*; it's definitely "lo-dig'".

Hundreds of Beavers tells the story of Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), a North American settler and prosperous apple-jack distiller and seller (and consumer), who has his business destroyed when beavers weaken the supports for mammoth kegs, sending them careening down a snowy mountain to crash into his house and explode in his fireplace, destroying his business and his apple orchard. Jean is, at once, homeless, work-less, thirsty and dang hungry, but finds that all his attempts to survive are undone by Fate and his own clumsiness. Somehow he must survive in the wintry wilderness by only his wits. Or half of them, anyway.

Because Jean is not the most adept outdoorsman. Food is abundant, but he can't fish, he can't hunt, nor does he have the tools to accomplish much. He must live off the land—starting fires (the wind blows them out), hunting rabbits (they beat him up), stealing eggs (always out of reach and birds like to peck his head), fishing (no bait), and anything he finds by accident are soon consumed by the local wildlife. Plus, his learning curve is nearly flat, requiring much trial and error, but mostly error, each go-'round a new and painful lesson.

Finally, he manages to land some fish, taking them to the local merchant (Doug Mancheski) for trade. At the post, he meets the merchant's lovely and provocative daughter (Olivia Graves), a furrier, as well as a Master Fur Trader (Wes Tank), who takes him under his wing to teach him the ways of the wild.

It could be Jeremiah Johnson done as a silent comedy (although it's not silent, the film is almost purely visual), by way of Buster Keaton done through a Chuck Jones lens, and cavorts into Fritz Lang territory as Kayak learns the true nature of what the busy beavers are up to in his neck of the woods. Imagine a Peter Sellers comedy (re-imagined by Terry Gilliam) with the reckless disregard for the laws of Nature—and physics—of a "Roadrunner" cartoon played at double-speed and you'll get the idea.

At times, it gets a little too complicated and maybe there are a few too many call-backs, but excess doesn't seem to be something the filmmakers were worried about. One can't deny that at many points it's just laugh-out-loud funny and endlessly inventive to the point of being ingenious, and one's affection grows as the film builds and builds until you finally give yourself over to the film while admitting that Beavers might have bitten off more than it can chew.

But, then, there is nothing wrong with that. One would rather see a movie "swing for the fences" than merely get by, leaving wasted potential like so much popcorn on a theater floor. By embracing old and new technology and with its dedication to cramming as much goofiness into its comparatively meager one hour forty-right minutes, Hundreds of Beavers manages more laughs per nickel spent than any movie release I've seen in the last ten years.