I don’t want to talk about too much about my most recent car repair of a broken mirror. It’s been made, it was a $30 fix and I did it myself. A number of small things went wrong and the repair process spanned multiple days instead of a quick hour or two.
What I want to talk about is the film that was a catharsis during that process, a little darling from Wisconsin that’s finally gotten distribution in theaters and now on streaming services that I originally rented and then after I finished watching the movie, said “I have to own this film in some capacity.”
That film is “Hundreds of Beavers.”
There are genres of films that I’m more averse to. It’s nothing against these genres, they are usually “not my cup of tea.” War movies, extremely gory horror movies, westerns and silent films are ones that usually operate on a harder scale for me.
I state this to make sure you understand that it is a stunning silent film that makes me sing it’s praises.
In “Hundreds of Beavers” you have a former distiller whose whole livelihood goes up in flames and he starts making his way as a fur trapper. He’s not very successful at first, and many of his methods would make their way into a Wile E. Coyote cartoon for how comically bad they fail and pose injury to him. And that’s one of the reasons it works for me is taking the Looney Tunes esque comedy to heightened levels. Icicles fall in comic fashion tracking our protagonist in ways icicles should not follow a target. Traps are delayed from smashing on our protagonist, or when they do, they do so in much larger ways, that over-exaggeration of Warner’s titular cartoons.
And our protagonist gets better at his fur trapping, much to the chagrin of many of his targets. The laughs still come as that happens, because the Rube Goldbergian methods he has set up finally pay off in fun and unexpected ways for him and his targets.
The film coalesces into a third act that is outlandishly fun and pays off on little pieces of threads the director has sprinkled in the film if you were paying attention as to what these beavers are actually looking to accomplish, despite the trappers involvement.
There’s a mix of practical, animated and CGI elements throughout.
That is not to say that it’s going to be a film for everyone. It’s still a film whose central point is fur trapping, and even adults dressed as beavers, raccoons, rabbits and wolves meet some dastardly deaths in the end. But for me, when I was having a bad day replacing the mirror I broke off my car, this was cathartic to watch a silent film so reminiscent of cartoons of yore.
If you liked Looney Tunes, zany comedies or the works of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin who excelled in the silent film genre, this is worth a rental.
Sunny Side – Hundreds of Beavers worth a rental
Nathan Countryman, Editor
May 2, 2024
About the Contributor
Nathan Countryman, Editor
Nathan Countryman is the Editor of the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun.