Director – Mike Cheslik, Screenplay – Mike Cheslik & Ryland Tews, Producers – Kurt Ravenwood, Matt Sabljak & Ryland Tews, Photography (b&w) – Quinn Hester, Music – Chris Ryan, Puppet Builder & Performer – Brandon Kirkham. Production Company – SRH.
Ryland Brickson Cole Tews (Jean Kayak), Olivia Graves (The Furrier), Doug Mancheski (The Merchant), Luis Rico (The Indian Fur Trapper), Wes Tank (The Master Fur Trapper)
Jean Kayak has his applejack manufacturing business sabotaged by beavers. Left ruined in the frozen wilderness, Jean searches for food and makes many attempts to trap and kill rabbits, beavers and fish, all without luck. He is able to kill one beaver and takes it back to a merchant to trade. Jean and the merchant’s daughter strike up an attraction and she provides him with a suit made of the beaver’s skin. Jean is aided by a master trapper and learns the ways of trapping before the trapper is killed by wolves. The merchant threatens Jean away from his daughter at rifle point and says he will only consider Jean’s entreaty to marry her if he brings him ‘hundreds of beavers’. Jean sets out to do so but the beavers prove wily and ingenious.
Hundreds of Beavers was a feature-length directorial debut for Mike Cheslik. Cheslik had previously co-written and produced Lake Michigan Monster (2018), directed by this film’s lead actor Ryland Brickson Cole Tews. (Cheslik and Tews have been friends since high school in Wisconsin). The film was shot with a budget of $150,000 over a twelve-week period in the middle of a Wisconsin winter. The film toured various film festivals since 2022, before receiving a digital release in 2024.
Within moments of opening, Hundreds of Beavers is immediately the most WTF film I have sat down to watch since … I lack any recent equivalent. The opening scenes with Ryland Brickson Cole Tews in a song-and-dance number around his applejack manufacturing operation before it is demolished by the beavers has a wildness that resembles something akin out of Karel Zeman, a director known for his unique blends of live-action and animation and cardboard cutout in films like The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1958), Baron Munchausen (1962) and others, by way of Tex Avery of Looney Tunes fame.
Indeed, Hundreds of Beavers is maybe the nearest live-action equivalent we have ever had to a Road Runner or Looney Tunes cartoon. There is a delirious madcap sequence within the first few minutes as Ryland Brickson Cole Tews attempts to trap various rabbits using a snowman made up to look like a female rabbit dangling a bra – which goes awry when the snowball he sends to kill them misses or the two rabbits walking by are revealed to be gay and holding hands, or else a giant snow carrot built on a hilltop pivots the wrong way.
All of the animals from the beavers to rabbits and the wolves are played by actors in animal suits. This proves especially amusing when it comes to the appearance of a dog sled team (actors in furrie suits) who are seen harnessed and pulling a sled through the snow. The Indian (Luis Rico) has a horse, which is an actor in a pantomime horse suit – we even see him trying to mount the horse and ride at one point. There are other such oddities as aquatic beavers swimming beneath the frozen lake and fish made of cloth.
Hundreds of Beavers is possibly the most creative film I have seen in a long time. There is no dialogue spoken throughout and Mike Cheslik’s visual gags are endlessly creative from the silent pantomimes with the merchant and Tew’s covert romance with his daughter. There’s the wonderfully nonsensical scenes where the dog pack are picked off at night by wolves as they sit around the campfire playing cards – and naturally, when it gets down to only one dog left, it is playing Solitaire. The beaver fort even comes with construction cranes and once Tews ventures inside we see the beavers attempting to launch a rocket built of logs in a simulation of a NASA control room. A beaver Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson even turn up. The climactic scenes involve Tews against beavers in high speed toboggan races and a giant wicker beaver man stomping across the landscape.
(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2022 list. Winner for Best Director (Mike Cheslik) at this site’s Best of 2022 Awards).
Trailer here