Director: Mike Cheslik
Cast: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Olivia Graves, Doug Mancheski

One of the things about the arts that gives me a lot of interest is when one kind of art form is, by another artist or artist, replicated in a completely different kind of media. Not just with the traditional arts, but also with television and movies. With television and movies, some of the most interesting reinterpretations have been converting live action or "real" stories into an animated format, and some have been very successful. One example is with the horror-comedy Beetlejuice. After it became a big hit during its theatrical run, it didn't take long for Warner Brothers to commission a Saturday morning cartoon TV series of the same name. It proved to be a big hit among the younger crowd, so much so that the series lasted an impressive four seasons on TV when most animated TV shows for kids at the time were lucky just to last one or two seasons. To this day, the animated TV show still has a large cult following, and one reason why I think this animated adaptation found the favor of viewers was the fact that the live action source material was a goofy and outlandish fantasy of sorts - so moving it to an animated format wasn't too much of a stretch for both the makers of the TV show and for viewers. Another successful leap from something "real" to animated format was with the Japanese semi-autobiographical wartime survival short story Grave Of The Fireflies, written by Akiyuki Nosaka. For many years, Nosaka resisted offers to have the story filmed as a live action movie, feeling that try as they might, live action filmmakers could not replicate both realistic characters and the backdrop of the place and era. He was eventually won over by an offer to adapt it as an animated movie, commenting later that he felt it couldn't have been made successfully in any other way. Film critic Roger Ebert later said of the animated movie, "Live action would have been burdened by the weight of special effects, violence, and action," and I think he was right with that theory, plus with his statement that Grave Of The Fireflies was one of the best animated movies ever made.

As I said, there have been many successful conversions to animation for television and movies over the decades. However, I have observed that when the opposite happens - some form of hand draw animation or computer animation converted to live-action - it almost never works very well. One example of that is with video games being converted to live action. Take the video game Street Fighter II - when I played the video game at my local arcade when I was much younger, I could accept the presentation of the extravagant characters and backdrops. However, when I eventually watched Street Fighter: The Movie with actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, the presentation of the same characters and backdrops in a live action form came off as being utterly ludicrous, with the costumes, hairstyles, and other details looking like nothing I would personally come across in my day-to-day life. There are, however, a lot more botched transformations to animation when the original property is some sort of animated motion picture. Way back in 1979, the live action movie The Villain, starring Kirk Douglas and Arnold Schwarzenegger, was basically 89 minutes of one Road Runner-style gag after another. However, seeing the outlandish gags in live action instead of animation just struck me as weird and unnatural. (It also didn't help that the makers of the movie forgot that one reason why Road Runner cartoons work is that they don't go longer than seven or so minutes in length.) Thirteen years later, Home Alone 2: Lost In New York was released to theaters, which in parts also emulated those old Looney Tunes cartoons, showing in live action gags like a child throwing bricks onto the heads of people from an apartment building roof, and people falling several stories and landing on the hard concrete below. Roger Ebert also had something to say about this, accurately writing, "The problem is, cartoon violence is only funny in cartoons. Most of the live-action attempts to duplicate animation have failed, because when flesh-and-blood figures hit the pavement, we can almost hear the bones crunch, and it isn't funny."

I admit that it's kind of strange that living or "real" things converted to animation can work well, but it doesn't usually work the other way around. To be honest, I can't really analyze and explain this difference any better than I did in the first two paragraphs of this review. All I can do is hopefully make you understand why, when the prospect of me watching something that was animated in its original form, but is now in live-action format crosses my path, I am really reluctant to check out the new version. But recently, I found one such example that when I researched it extensively, intrigued me instead of turning me off. That movie was Hundreds Of Beavers, a very low budget independently-made live action movie whose reviews indicated that it was full of slapstick gags right out of those old Looney Tunes cartoons. Though its theatrical release was kind of spotty, it all the same managed to gross over $750,000 during its theatrical run - a great gross for an ultra-independent movie that reportedly only cost $150,000 to make. More importantly, those aforementioned reviews also indicated that this attempt at being a live action cartoon was actually good. So I sat down (albeit with still a little wariness) to give it a watch. The central character in Hundreds Of Beavers is a fellow named Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), an apple orchard farmer living in the Great Lakes area in the 1800s. His apple livelihood is shattered when pesky gnawing beavers indirectly cause his cabin to explode, which ruins his orchard. That winter, Kayak struggles mightily trying to survive by trapping in the wilderness, and while at first his attempts prove to be inept and backfire on him, soon he starts to get better at it. Kayak sells what he traps to a merchant (Doug Mancheski,) who has set up shop in the area, and in quick order, Kayak falls hard for the merchant's daughter (Olivia Graves). But the merchant in short order tells Kayak that there is a price for his daughter's hand in marriage - hundreds of beaver pelts. Kayak soon starts on a quest to gather what the merchant asks, but the beavers in the area - who look remarkably like humans wearing beaver costumes - are no ordinary beavers, possessing a great intelligence and cunning that threatens to foil Kayak at every turn.

Whether you are making something that is live action or animated, one thing that you have to remember to do is to include characters that the audience can identify with to some degree and find interesting to watch. Fortunately, Hundreds Of Beavers' director and co-writer Mike Cheslik (who was also the movie's visual effects guru), he seemed to have known this right from the start. Looking at the supporting players who make brief appearances here and there, Cheslik makes sure to make them eccentric, yet very amiable. Even the Native American character comes across as likable and sympathetic despite a few jokes made at his expense. Though when it comes to the movie's characters, just about all the focus is on the Jean Kayak character played by Tews, and it's up to this character to provide pretty much all the movie's character development. As it turns out, Kayak is an interesting and engaging character. You definitely see some Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd in this guy, not just the fact that he has no intelligible dialogue (just grunts, cheers, and other guttural noises - there's almost no real spoken dialogue by anyone in the movie, if you don't count a narrative song at the movie's opening scene); he starts out defeated and dejected, but once he sees a possible victory in sight - even one that will take a lot of work to achieve against all odds - he throws himself completely into the task and never gives up. Wisely, the Kayak character is never made to come across as arrogant or know-it-all as he struggles and slowly starts to improve as he gets closer to his goal. Sure, actor Tews definitely doesn't make his character stone-faced like Keaton, or relative calm like Lloyd - he does a lot of mugging, exaggerated facial expressions, and wild body movements and expressions. This could have easily hurt the movie and made it too goofball for the audience's taste, but somehow Tews, as he gleefully bounds around in front of the camera, comes across as extremely likeable, having an infectious spirit that you can't help but smile at and consequently make you root for him to keep fighting for what he wants to get. You'll be on his side from the beginning right to the end.

I should add that the portrayal of Jean Kayak, while definitely in a live action setting, does feel cartoony to the right degree - exaggerated, but at the same time it fits the surrounding atmosphere generated in Hundreds Of Beavers. This atmosphere is generated in several intriguing and very effective ways by director Cheslik. The first reason is evident right from the start of the movie, in that the movie was presented in black and white. This is a genius touch, because first of all, having the movie be presented in color would have made this world too "real", and as a consequence it would have been a lot more difficult for the audience to accept the various cartoon-like situations. Second, the black and white photography reminds us of those black and white Hollywood cartoons from the 1930s from Max Fleischer and his brethren, where anything could happen in those cartoons. However, Cheslik was careful not to simply jump into a black and white world with this live action cartoon; the lengthy opening of the movie mixes both live action and traditional animation to get the audience accustomed to a world that subsequently will be almost as wild as a traditional animated short subject. Subsequently, what follows is generally all live action, albeit with some computer-generated special effects sprinkled in to enhance this not-quite-real world, which eventually leads to a lengthy and utterly wild climax where the special effects play as prominently as the Kayak character, and all these extremes manage to mix together beautifully and keep the same tone and feeling throughout. Speaking of the special effects, I have to say that they and the movie's other production values look absolutely amazing for the aforementioned $150,000 budget. Sure, those computer-generated special effects sometimes do obviously show they were done on a personal computer instead of more high-tech computers, but generally Hundreds Of Beavers, from its special effects to camera work, looks like it cost several times more than what was actually spent to make it.

In fact, a few times when the low budget of the movie does show, the movie manages to spin it around to its favor. Those pesky beavers are played by human actors wearing cheesy furrie beaver costumes, and their appearances always put a smile on my face even when a gag wasn't being executed at the very moment. Most of the other attempts at humor in Hundreds Of Beavers are more elaborate, however, and they managed to provoke a lot of laughs from me. The majority of the gags are setpieces that, while in live action, are right out of those cartoons from the golden age of Hollywood. For example, a hungry Kayak looks at a rabbit and it dissolves into a giant drumstick, Kayak thinking he's snowshoeing across a frozen lake but looks down to see he hasn't moved an inch forward because of the slippery ice, and running gags involving a woodpecker, as well as with the merchant's repeated attempts to spit tobacco into a spittoon. These and other gags are executed in a manner to be very funny and feel fresh despite heavily emulating from their golden age inspiration, one reason also being that Cheslik throws in some amusing (and wisely mild) scatological, sexual, and gory gags that you'd never find in a golden age cartoon. I should also add that the attempts at humor in Hundreds Of Beavers are incredibly relentless, so much so that the classic Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker comedy team would be slack-jawed by the sheer amount and creativity of the showcased humor. However, I would suspect that, like me, the ZAZ team, while finding much of the humor, would in the end say that there is somewhat too much humor. There is so much humor at times that some of it goes by so fast that you won't be able to figure out what about the particular gag was supposed to be funny - and sometimes it's difficult to know basically what just happened. Also, there is so much humor that it comes as the expense of the movie's storytelling; there isn't much plot on display here. The lack of plot may not have been bad in one of those classic seven-minute golden age Hollywood cartoons, but we're talking about a movie that's 108 minutes long. In fact, I have to admit that I had to pause the movie several times to take a break for a few minutes because I was utterly overwhelmed with long stretches of multiple wacky gags with no advancement in the movie's plot. Still, at least with this particular movie, too much was definitely better than too little, and I do recommend that you watch Hundreds Of Beavers. Just make sure you're able to not watch it all in one go; trust me, you'll thank me for that last bit of advice.

(Posted February 17, 2025)