Hundreds of Beavers

If you’ve been blessed enough to bear witness to the delightful absurdity of nautical live-action cartoon Lake Michigan Monster, then you’ll be looking out for Ryland Brickson Cole Tews in Hundreds of Beavers. And within the first few bars of opening frontier ballad “Jean Kayak,” sung over a Winsor McCay-esque cartoon of a raucous night at an apple jack distillery, there he is, the writer, director, star, producer, and prop maker for that 2018 tidal wave of lunacy and loving homage to sea shanties and sailors’ tales. For Hundreds of Beavers, his microbudget follow-up, Tews hands directing duties over to Lake Michigan Monster editor Mike Cheslik (with whom he shares scriptwriting credit this time around), but there’s no missing his presence.

Initially, Tews may be hard to recognize as clean-shaven Jean Kayak, a simple apple farmer whose livelihood is ruined when beavers chew off the legs of his applejack barrel and cause carnage as they roll it away for nefarious ends. Because goddam beavers, of course they do. However, when Jean emerges, months later, from out of a giant snowdrift, sporting a humongous and suspiciously fake-looking beard, you’ll know it’s Tews. He’s a walking cartoon of a man who refuses to take anything seriously except for the very serious business of being very, very, very silly. And very, very, very silly is an apt description of this hilarious and ridiculous fur trader photoplay, in which the hapless Jean endures countless, wordless indignities at the hands, claws, and machinations of the bucktoothed interlopers.

Tews has been open about how much his work is inspired by the quirky surrealist visions of Guy Maddin for his stylistic sensibilities, and the hyperbolic wackiness of early Sam Raimi for his humor. (There’s also more than a trace of the free-form sketch lunacy of British comedy legends Benny Hill and the Goodies in Cheslik’s dedication to having Jean step on, in, or through everything in search of a joke.) Luckily for younger audiences, Hundreds of Beavers is filmed in black and white, so even the butchering of his first beaver carcass at the delicate hands and mighty cleaver of his gal, the Furrier (the very game Graves), never comes within peering distance of Evil Dead II levels of grisly. Also, the racoons are actually people in giant, furry, mascot-style racoon suits, as are the sleigh dogs that haul the sleds of the more competent trappers, the rabbits that Jean spends much of the first half hour trying and failing to hunt, and the odd very stinky skunk.

Hundreds of Beavers works because everyone involved knows to deliver the whimsy with a straight face, treating knitted fish, puppet frogs, and the Wisconsin snowdrifts in which it was filmed all as equally real. There are no knowing nods to the audience, even if an actor is wearing a giant beaver skin hat while shimmying up a very fake-looking tree to escape a pack of furries. Cheslik and Tews’ script relishes running gags, like the constant struggles of Furrier’s protective father, the Merchant (played with a Popeye grimace by Mancheski), and his spittoon, or the ongoing war between Jean and his true nemesis, that accursed woodpecker. But the key there is that the running jokes become the story, as a mishap becomes a lesson becomes how Jean becomes a better trapper. The repetition and development turn the whole movie into a magnificent Rube Goldberg machine, getting Jean ever closer to his true goal of winning over the Merchant so that he can ask him for the Furrier’s hand in marriage. After all, that’s how so many of those old-timey wilderness adventures ended, with true love winning in the end, the formation of Green Bay, and hundreds and hundreds of beavers.