Hundreds Of Beavers review: A furry fracas in silent style

With influences including Charlie Chaplin, Guy Maddin, Looney Tunes, Trey Parker, Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, and a handful of Nintendo games, Hundreds Of Beavers is one of the most distinctive movies you’ll see all year, and one made for midnight viewings if ever anything was. It’s the sort of movie that if you watched it while high, you’d never believe had actually been a real thing, and is likely to be a mainstay of furry conventions from here on out. (The movie credits prefer the term “mascot,” but we all know what people dressed as fuzzy cartoon animals tend to call themselves when they gather.)

Don’t confuse this film with Zombeavers, the sort of campy horror hook the title may imply. In black and white, with virtually no dialogue, Hundreds Of Beavers isn’t exactly a silent movie. Like Nicolas Cage in Willy’s Wonderland, the characters grunt and scream. Yet it uses the tropes of one, with heavy grain, closing irises, inter-titles, and fake film deterioration.

A rousing, partly animated and only partially comprehensible musical number introduces us to Jean Kayak (played by Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who has arguably the coolest name of any new actor this year), a brewer of alcoholic applejack. When beaver damage causes his brewing tanks and house to explode, he finds himself stranded in a snowy wilderness with nothing to eat. There are plenty of critters around, if he could just manage to actually catch one.

Said critters—beavers, rabbits, raccoons, and others—are all played by people in cartoon-animal suits, mostly for goofs, but occasionally taking on a tinge of menace when the soundtrack turns dark. The opening credits don’t run until about half an hour in; until they do, what we see is essentially a series of live-action Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd skits, with the hapless Jean frequently outwitted and outfought by both the critters and the arbitrary laws of cartoon physics. It’s novel for a while, but at a certain point, the viewer may worry. This can’t be the entire movie, right?

Rest assured, there is a plot, even if it’s not much of one. Jean finds a fur-trapper mentor (Wes Tank) who looks like Santa Claus and teaches him not to be a complete disaster, even as wolves kill off their hunting dogs (also full-sized people in costumes) one by one. When he’s finally forced to strike out on his own, Jean finds a trading post that functions just like it would in a video game—after every mission, he can trade in the furs he’s assembled for other goods and services, with the ultimate goal being the hand of the trader’s daughter (Olivia Graves) in marriage.

The map Jean uses resembles one from Super Mario World, with an animated, 8-bit-like Jean moving across it from destination to destination, completing furrier missions at each stop. He’s still barely more competent than Wile E. Coyote, but he does occasionally manage to succeed. Meanwhile, the beavers build a massive, pyramid-like fortress, log by log, that Jean will eventually have to storm if he’s to level up for the final mission. Little does he know that cartoon beaver versions of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are on his tail.

Yeah. You read it right. This movie is 108 minutes of that, both to its credit and detriment. Two-dimensional characters may be appropriate for a live-action cartoon, the sort of Steamboat Willie riff that doesn’t actually require leveraging the public domain to rip off a famous character, but pays homage to its style instead. Yet it’s hard to emotionally invest in any of it. The beavers are about as sympathetic as the Caddyshack gopher, and Jean’s a nitwit, so the audience’s only rooting interest is in seeing how crazy things get. Fortunately for those who do hang in there through the semi-repetitive slapstick bits, the climax pulls out all the stops, with manic, video-game style platforming action, a beaver kaiju, and a SpaceX spoof that comes out of nowhere.

Tews is game for all the mugging his character requires, and avoids the biggest potential hurdle of something like this by never acting smarter than the material. He’s clearly studied the silent clowns of cinema in preparation, thoroughly embarrassing his character but never himself. As for all the furries/mascots, don’t expect any riffs on the negative stereotypes often held against that community; they’re more akin to Universal’s Minions, even using recognizable French words at times. There’s an extended gag based on Coolidge’s Dogs Playing Poker paintings that cracked me up, and it’s much easier to take the violent plot when death is simply represented by the beavers having Xs over their eyes.

Director Mike Cheslik, who co-wrote the movie with Tews, needs to prove he can do more than this style if he’s going to last. But at least for one film, he’s done a thing that literally nobody else is doing in quite the same way. Even if it does tax the patience at times.

Hundreds Of Beavers opens in select theaters on March 14.