Hundreds of Beavers

 After his applejack brewery is destroyed by beavers, Jean (Ryland Brickson Cole Thews, MBCT from here on because... come on!) is left to fend for himself in the frigid reaches of the American upper midwest somewhen around the eighteenth century.

 Survival is the first order of the day. Hunting for food is hard at the best of times, but poor Jean happens to inhabit a reality that's closer to the old Looney Tunes cartoons than ours; so when he tries to hunt for rabbits, say, by the perfectly reasonable method of building a rabbit snow woman as a lure and then trying to kill them with a giant bowling snowball, his intended prey survives by standing exactly where the bowling ball's holes are when it rolls over them.

 As Jean explores his surroundings he starts wooing the furrier daughter (Olivia Graves) of a hostile frontier merchant (Doug Mancheski), is taken under the wing of a rugged trapper (Wes Tank), and falls afoul of the woodland's powerful beaver empire as he tries to hunt down Hundreds of Beavers to convince the shopkeeper to allow him to marry his paramour.

 Hundreds of beavers is an awe-inspiring, low-budget mix of animation and live footage shot in black & white digital video that tries to mimic the earliest slapstick films of the silent era. Like other similar  digital-age pastiches, it looks aggressively artificial, almost surreal. But this low-fi, anything goes aesthetic allows the film to shuffle a huge number of influences: Buster Keaton and the Three Stooges, videogames, the aforementioned Looney Tunes, Guy Maddin's go-for-broke weirdness... It's a disparate, heady cocktail that the film wrangles into a coherent and wholly original tale of deeply hilarious woodland genocide.
 It is fucking grand.

 All the woodland animals are either people dressed in full-body mascot costumes or, for smaller animals, simple marionettes or (very charming) sock puppets. There's very little dialog - people and animals do make sounds, but it's mostly simple vocalizations, one pretty catchy song, and wall-to-wall music (the last two courtesy of Chris Ryan and MBCT's dad Wayne Tews).

 The script, by director Mike Cheslik and MBCT, keeps a constant stream of gags and surrealist conceits coming. As the film advances the jokes are layered upon each other until they reach a really impressive Rube Goldberg-style level of complexity in which many different established elements are combined to build new, more elaborate visual gags; This movie has no business being an hour fifty, and indeed, it starts to wear out its welcome late in the first act. But that's quickly reversed thanks to the sheer density of gags and an almost infinite level of invention; The final hour or so is both enthralling and hilarious.

 So it's a much more successful version of The Lake Michigan Monster, basically, which was made by many of the same people.

 Also in its DNA: videogames; This may be the first movie I see with a shop interface. Normally that'd a bad thing, but the way they're integrated here is seamless, with a plot that effortlessly weaves computer gaming conventions into the story. So the challenges and progression of a survival game ("get three beaver skins and one rabbit pelt") actually drive the plot, and Monkey-Island-esque puzzles provide some pretty big laughs. Visually it also reaches back to the early days of SNES/C64 gaming for some of its compositions, which mirror both old 2D platformer game single-screen layouts and isometric points of view. Aside from that the film's not afraid to make copious reference to things both apposite (Buster Keaton's Seven Chances) and completely bizarre (one of Clive Barker's weirder short stories).

 Honestly? This might be the best new comedy I've seen in a very long time; I can't recommend it enough.