Cinema possesses the power to show us things we’ve never seen before. All it takes is a single image to transform the medium beyond its wildest imagination. The Lumiére brothers showed the world what a train arriving at a station looked like.
Alfred Hitchcock dispatched his unsuspecting protagonist with a shocking murder in her motel shower. Stanley Kubrick took us on an interstellar stargate vortex to a whole other plane of existence. But, most importantly, Mike Cheslik gave us a horse, but not just any horse — the greatest movie horse.
If you’re wondering why I’m fixated on a horse despite the fact that the feature I’m covering is titled “Hundreds of Beavers,” (aside from it being one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen) it’s because it goes to show how this one running sight gag (in an ocean of them) can leave the kind of impact most contemporary comedies would kill for. The remaining hour and 47 minutes not only cements writer-director-editor-VFX artist Cheslik as a must-watch filmmaker on the rise, but the film itself as a landmark of the genre. Equal parts live-action “Looney Tunes” and ode to the silent clowns, “Hundreds of Beavers” is an awe-inspiringly funny silent comedy adventure about Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), a drunken 19th century applejack salesman who falls on hard times after his whole operation goes up in flames.
To get back on his barrel, Kayak takes to becoming a bonafide Wisconsin fur trapper. But the animals he.