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‘Hundreds of Beavers’ Review: A Singular Live-Action Cartoon of Inspired Slapstick
Director Mike Cheslik and co-writer/star Ryland Tews’ 'Hundreds of Beavers' is a DIY delight, reinventing silent comedy on its own antic terms.
It begins with a bona fide production number telling the tale of Jean Kayak (Tews), a woodsy entrepreneur whose excessive love of his own inebriative applejack leads to the wholesale destruction of his orchards and brewery — much expedited by a plague of ravenous local beavers. A big part of the fun is the soundtrack, which — with its combined foley effects, nonverbal exclamations, amusingly selected library music, and diverse original score by Chris Ryan — proves equal to the visual imagination on display. Itself a sort of vast homage to comedy traditions past, “Hundreds of Beavers” will certainly recall for many viewers the Road Runner v. Coyote saga, as well as pre-talkie knockabout humor, frontier parody “Cannibal: The Musical,” pioneering screen fantasists Georges Melies and Karel Zeman, and so on.
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