Hundreds of Beavers

A live action Looney Tune—what a concept. Someone did a lot of brainstorming to come up with the idea and execution of this singular film. I wouldn’t have guessed that anyone could pull off a work like this and have it play as well as this movie does. After all, the Wile E. Coyote shorts—the nearest example of a work that shares this flick’s DNA—are exactly that: short. You don’t need to run the gag for all that long. But here, the bit unspools for nearly two hours, and it’s impressive that much of the proceedings actually work. That’s not to say there aren’t stumbles; sometimes jokes get repetitive, and the scenario goes a bit too far off course towards the end, where the absurd construct (literally) ranges a little too far from the heart of the humor, but every time you think this movie has run its course and exhausted its inventiveness, there comes a sight gag or clever setup that elicits a laugh-out-loud moment, and then the viewer is back on the story’s side. The combination of live-action work and highly cartoonish animation—almost every character in the movie is a person in an explicitly unrealistic suit, or a model of some sort—makes for a lively visual experience, while the dialogue (or rather, lack thereof—more like aural cues) gives you just enough information to leave no doubt about what’s going on. There’s even a touch of actual history hidden in the narrative—the beaver trade really was a driving force in the conquest of the continent. That’s a whole lot of entertainment packed into a rather modest feature—more than enough to make the discerning viewer say…Dam! That’s good!