'Hundreds of Beavers' Movie Review: A Black-And-White Slapstick Miracle Made for $150,000

You know that thing where you start grinning like an idiot ten minutes into a film and don't stop until the credits roll? Hundreds of Beavers does that. It's a 108-minute black-and-white silent slapstick comedy made for $150,000, where guys in giant beaver mascot costumes get pummelled, blown up, sliced, frozen, sued in beaver court, and rolled into snowballs. It sounds insane on paper. It plays insane on screen. And against all reasonable odds, it's one of the best things to happen to American comedy in years.

Why You Need to Watch This One

Director Mike Cheslik and his co-writer/star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews have made the kind of film Hollywood doesn't make anymore and frankly doesn't even know how to make. It's a feature-length cartoon shot in real snow, where the laws of physics are decided by Looney Tunes and the budget was decided by what could fit in a van.

The premise is simple. Tews plays Jean Kayak, a hopelessly drunk applejack salesman whose orchard gets demolished by beavers in the opening minutes. He passes out, wakes up in the dead of winter, and slowly grinds his way from clueless idiot to master fur trapper. He's also trying to win the hand of the Furrier (Olivia Graves), whose father (Doug Mancheski) tells him he needs hundreds of beaver pelts to seal the deal. From there it's basically a video game. Jean fails, learns, levels up, builds increasingly absurd Rube Goldberg traps, and the second act literally plays like watching a Let's Play. Cheslik has said as much in interviews.

There is no dialogue. Almost no words at all. And somehow you forget that almost immediately, because the visual storytelling is so dense and so specific that English would only get in the way.

The One-Man VFX Studio Hiding in a Wisconsin Snowbank

Here's the trivia that breaks people's brains. Cheslik did all 1,500 visual effects shots himself, on his home computer, in After Effects. There were only six beaver costumes on set the entire shoot. Every shot where you see an army of them is the same six guys cloned and composited.

The mascot suits were ordered online from a Chinese costume company for around $10,000 total, and the teeth were modified by the filmmakers because the originals didn't look funny enough. The whole thing was shot over 12 weeks in subzero Wisconsin and Michigan during the winter of 2019 to 2020. The crew was getting their two-wheel-drive van stuck in snowbanks every other day. Cheslik has said in interviews that nobody on set was actually laughing during the shoot. They were stoically executing gags they'd written years earlier on note cards. Engineering problems, basically. Not joy.

Post-production took two more years. Tews's father Wayne composed the songs. Sound designer Bobb Barito used kazoos and wooden clappers for the sound effects, and ran violence through audio distortion because, in his words, violence sounds funniest when it's really distorted. If you've ever started making something with friends and given up halfway, this is the movie that will haunt you.

Tews Is Doing Buster Keaton By Way of Jackie Chan

Ryland Brickson Cole Tews is the engine. He's onscreen almost constantly, eating snow, falling off things, fighting beavers in elaborate kung-fu-style brawls, and selling every gag with a face that's basically pre-talkie silent comedy mugging crossed with the hangdog energy of a guy who knows he's the punchline. Tews has said his physical performance was modelled on Jackie Chan, and you can see it in the way he uses his environment as a weapon and a hazard at the same time. Every fence, every log, every frozen pond is doing work.

Olivia Graves doesn't have a ton of screen time as the Furrier, but she gets one of the film's funniest running bits and somehow makes pining for a degenerate alcoholic look romantic. The supporting humans (Wes Tank as the Master Fur Trapper, Luis Rico as the Indian Fur Trapper, Mancheski as the Merchant) all play it deadpan, which is exactly the right call. They're the straight men. The beavers are doing all the heavy lifting in the comedy department, including a pair of detective beavers and a slick-talking suspender-wearing prosecutor who steals an entire trial sequence.

Where It Wobbles

It's not perfect. The 108-minute runtime is debatable. The middle stretch repeats its rhythms a bit more than it needs to, and a tighter cut closer to 90 minutes might have made it even sharper. There's also a bit late in the film involving high-pitched cartoon voices for some of the beavers that some viewers loved and others (me) found broke the silent-film spell. The committed style is also the limit of the style. The film never really shifts gears, and if you fall off the wavelength early, there's nowhere for it to bring you back.

Quibbles, in a film otherwise doing things nobody else is even attempting.

Things to Look Out For

Cheslik has openly cited Buster Keaton's Seven Chances, Ernst Lubitsch's The Wildcat (1921), the Mario games, and Abbott and Costello as influences. The third-act castle infiltration is a deliberate love letter to that staple of action movies that Cheslik says he keeps wanting to see done well. Watch for the moment Jean rolls a literal snowball of beaver bodies toward the climax. Watch the brawls. Watch the way the camera sits in long-lens, wide-shot Keaton compositions where you can see the whole gag setup at once. The blinking eyes on the beaver jury (a 20-minute After Effects fix) are also worth catching.

Daniel Scheinert (co-director of Everything Everywhere All At Once) called it "the future of cinema." Matt Zoller Seitz gave it four stars at RogerEbert.com and listed it the fourth-best film of 2024. It sits at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. The film grossed $1.5 million theatrically off a $150,000 budget, and pulled all of that off self-distributed, with the filmmakers literally booking the screenings themselves.

You'll laugh. You'll be confused. And then you'll wonder how nobody else is making movies like this, before realising someone in Wisconsin just remembered how.