I only intended to watch a couple minutes of Hundreds of Beavers last night, just long enough to verify that it was included with Amazon Prime video, but I was caught up in it pretty quickly, and I ended up watching the whole thing.
It was released in 2022, and I’ve been hearing people raving about it for the past two years. And it seems very much like something that would’ve blown my mind had I seen it without knowing anything about it. After the opening song, it’s filmed like a silent movie, in grainy monochrome, with a handful of actors and a ton of people in animal suits acting out all the parts of a hyper-violent, adult-oriented Looney Tunes cartoon.
It’s extremely clever, alternating between absurd slapstick, lowbrow humor, and ingenious gags with a rhythm that keeps you engaged far longer than you might expect. (Hence my “accidentally” watching the whole thing!) There were more laugh-out-loud moments than just about anything I’ve seen recently. One of my favorite gags was our protagonist Jean Kayak unsuccessfully using lady rabbit snowmen posed removing their bras, in an attempt to attract a couple of rabbits that turn out to be gay. Another had Kayak joining an experienced trapper with a team of sled dogs; when they camped every night, the humans would lie by the fire while the dogs would sit around a table and play poker. The dogs were picked off one by one, until the only survivor would stand at the table and play solitaire.
But possibly because I went into the movie knowing what to expect, I ended up liking it but not entirely loving it. I love that the filmmakers approached it as a real work of art, and they committed to making something that’s completely unlike anything else being made today. And I love that it felt as if they’d used everything available to get the look exactly right — cartoon drawings, video effects, puppets, overlays, some computer-generated imagery, whatever it takes. The end result is unique and completely true to itself, and also pretty damn corny.
One thing I like a lot is that as the movie progresses, it starts to embrace the absurdity of stuff that it’s spent the last hour asking you to accept as if it weren’t absurd. Throughout the movie, most of the animals are played by humans in animal suits, and as far as the movie’s concerned, they’re animals. Even though they’re walking around on two legs and doing human type stuff. When Jean Kayak manages to kill a raccoon and take it to the furrier, we see the autopsy, which includes pulling out lots of felt intestines and a heart-shaped pillow.
Later, when we meet a Native American trapper, we see that his horse is two men in an even cheaper horse suit, with the face of one of the men clearly visible underneath the misshapen head. A while after that, we see the Native American try to mount his horse, which clearly involves clumsily climbing onto a man’s back and trying to hold on.
By the end of the movie, Jean Kayak is fighting dozens of beavers, and he’s literally knocking the stuffing out of each one. A head will fly off, sending bits of padding and styrofoam peanuts flying everywhere. During one brawl, he picks up the body of one of the beavers and spins it around the room, and it’s clearly just his twirling around an empty suit. Then the beavers retaliate by throwing him into a wall, and it’s clearly an empty human suit.
There’s a rigid set of symbols in the movie, one that it establishes over time. When a character does this, that happens. When we see this shape, we know it means that. It builds up a language of gags over time, as (for instance) we learn what bait attracts which animal, which animals prey on which other ones, etc. So it’s neat that towards the end of the movie, it starts to deconstruct the language it’s been constructing this whole time. The symbols start to fold in on themselves. This guy in a beaver suit represents a beaver, and he is a beaver, except now he’s also a guy in a beaver suit. The Treachery of Furries, maybe?
I don’t think any of that was in the mindset of the filmmakers, or at least I hope it wasn’t. I just think that it’s an interesting side effect that happens when you so completely commit to the bit. From watching Hundreds of Beavers, I learned that the filmmakers have an earlier movie called Lake Michigan Monster that’s also on Prime Video. From the trailer, it seems to be almost as committed to being visually distinctive, and every bit as committed to being unapologetically silly.