If, in a parallel universe that I would very much like to visit, Chuck Jones hired Guy Maddin to create a Looney Tunes cartoon, the result might not be too different from Mike Cheslik’s HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS. This gleefully unhinged excursion into intrigue, romance, and the call of the wild transcends, and transgresses, many genres with steely determination and a refined sense of absurdity. So refined that by its hellzapoppin climax, that absurdity has been normalized, and real life has become the outlier. With no dialogue (aside from a stray J’accuse or mumble), it is shot with live-action against animation that is then layered again onto live-action. Black-and-white cinematography gives it both a retro aesthetic and a futuristic vibe as actors in mascot costumes essay a variety of savvy woodland creatures, and plant life seems to have it in for the humans in their midst.
It begins with St. Augustine’s quote about chastity deferred, but before we get to why that topic is broached, we are treated to an ode by way of a cautionary tale about applejack. That would be the fermented libation, not the breakfast item (though a sequel about that from this team would be more than welcome). Cut to our hapless hero, Jean Kayak (co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) purveyor of applejack, who has imbibed too much of his product only to be invaded by a horde of overly ambitious beavers. The resulting destruction of the brewery forces Jean to find other employment, Through fate or serendipity, he finds himself a fur-trapper in the wintry wilds of Michigan and/or Wisconsin, eking out a meager living by trading with the local merchant (Doug Mancheski), and falling for the merchant’s spirited daughter (Olivia Graves), a furrier who has driven off all her other suitors with the promise of grievous bodily harm. If not death. Certainly, she has torn into Jean’s heart (metaphorically) the way she tears into the woodland creatures procured by her father.
What ensues is Jean’s attempts to win over the father by playing the merchant’s complicated barter game, while fending off the not entirely unwanted pre-marital advances of the daughter, acceptance of which would involve the same sort of grievous bodily harm at the father’s hands, if not death, that the suitors faced at the hands of his daughter. Never has an ankle been more alluring, never the intertwinement of sex and death so starkly rendered.
Alas, Jean is inept in the face of a nature that is not so much red in tooth and claw as it is malicious and capable of impressive project management. It’s not survival of the fittest, but of the cleverest, which turns out not to be the same thing. This is a nature that has organized itself for its own purpose and is using the eponymous rodents as its method of execution. Not that the burr bushes and trees aren’t also wreaking havoc with what seems to be personal grudges. Plus, there’s a rascally rabbit strikingly reminiscent of Jones’ own iconic Lepus, knitted fish with the burden of ennui lurking in their eyes, and something even higher on the food chain than Jean tracking him and his card-playing sled-dogs as they ply a labyrinthine trapline through the desolate landscape.
What Cheslik and Tews have created here is so visually acute that trying to describe it in words is almost an insult. There is a log-rolling sequence that may have penetrated the quantum realm, and an extended scramble through a command installation worthy of any Bond film. The artifice of humans in animal costumes is surprisingly effective, as the actors behind fixed masks find ways to use body language to communicate a startling range of emotions and intentions. The unchanging faces become menacing, especially when the actors are static, ranged in lines, the immobile faces staring, the camera angles evoking nothing so much as German Expressionism at its most potent, stirring smore than a frisson of terror in the onlooker drinks in the eerie spectacle. So does the self-satisfied efficiency with which the fur trader’s daughter eviscerates a fur-bearing creature, flinging felted organs and crafting a suit for her chosen boyfriend when nature has sent him back to her in a state of nature. As for Tews, he delivers an eloquent performance in or out of clothing, finding nimble ways to use his wiry body and a rubbery face that chart how Jean’s hopes and dreams rise or fall with unmistakable clarity. Even when engaged in the outsized buffoonery demanded of the work, he is precise and devastatingly affecting.
In the early days of animation, there was the same hallucinogenic approach that HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS takes. It was an animistic world in which no stretch of the imagination was too much, and no pratfall was off limits. The tropes and idioms are here are inspired by Mr. Jones, but the plot has whiffs of Ionesco, Kafka, Melville, and the most puckish aspects of popular culture used as non-sequiturs. This cracked masterpiece is a marvel of assertive comic originality that pays homage to its roots with a synthesis that staggers and delights.
Your Thoughts?