Hundreds of Beavers is a film that doesn’t seem like it would be able to sustain its premise or its vision for the entirety of its 108 minute runtime, but it somehow manages to do so. This movie made me laugh aloud, on average, about every thirty seconds all the way through. I don’t know that it will work for everyone, but it certainly did for me. Shot in black and white, this is a Looney Tunes sketch stretched to feature length, about a man named Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), a successful applejacker who loses everything in a fire after imbibing a bit too much one night and finds himself alone and cold in the Canadian wilderness. After several unsuccessful attempts at catching wild game, he finally manages to put together a few Wile E. Coyote-esque traps (without any assistance from ACME at all) and sustain himself. Eventually, he stumbles upon a fur trader (Doug Mancheski) and his lovely daughter (Olivia Graves), decides to become a fur trapper himself in order to win her hand, and sets out to acquire the furs of the titular hundreds of beavers. Oh, and did we mention that every animal in this film is portrayed via high-quality mascot costumes? 

Our generation (and those bracketing it, so don’t think you’re not included in this, dear reader) usually encounter the animated shorts of the past at such a young age that their surreality is lost on us. The language of it is simple and straightforward in a way that we understand, even when we’re still piloting safety scissors with mushy, mushy brains. In Wackiki Wabbit, when Bugs Bunny ends up on an island with two castaways who look at him and see not a cartoon rabbit but a piping hot, meaty entree, we don’t give it a second thought. Seeing that gag translated to live action, and then grow more bizarrely envisioned and strangely realized each time the increasingly starved Kayak fails to gather eggs or catch a fish, one comes face to face with just how surreal the cartoon world is, and that makes it all the funnier as these man-sized fursuit beavers start to demonstrate a human-like complexity of thought. They go from animals that are slightly too clever to be caught by Kayak’s first attempts at traps to full on rocket scientists as the film moves along, and it happens so gradually that you find yourself trying to remember where everything went off the rails before you remember this happened moments after you started the movie. 

I recently had some trouble trying to figure out what to say about Spirited Away for similar reasons. It was hard to explain what works so well about Spirited Away because you find yourself simply recapping the movie, which undersells what makes it so special. It’s really best for you to discover all the things that it has in store for you by watching it, because no description of any of the film’s gags will do justice to taking it in with your own (presumably two) eyeballs. But, since you’re already here, I might as well list some of my favorites, right? At one point in the film, Kayak is taken under the wing of an older, wiser fur trapper (Wes Tank), who teaches him how to master the art; said trapper uses a dog-driven sled, and each night, the dogs (remember, every animal is a person in a mascot suit) play a card game. As they camp in a wolf-ridden forest, the dogs are slowly taken in the night, so that we go from a full table of dogs in the iconic “dogs playing poker” mold to a single, shivering dog playing solitaire alone. It’s a gag on top of a gag on top of a gag, and that’s Hundreds of Beavers to the core: gags all the way down. I was also particularly taken with a very droopy, stoned-looking frog puppet and was delighted when it reappeared later in the film, and the commitment to the humans-as-animals bit extends all the way to having the horses in the film be that stereotypical sitcom get-up of two people acting as the front and rear of a mare. It never gets old, and that’s the real treasure here. The film never lets you catch your breath long enough to get tired of its schtick, and that kind of sustained humor is a rarity. 

You (yes, you!) can watch Hundreds of Beavers, for free, right now, as long as you have your library card, and you’re stateside. As of this writing, the film is still streaming for free on Hoopla, the service that provides you with four free borrows a month via your local library. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond