In that spirit, many of the movements of people and animals in the movie are no more “realistic” than those of the little cutout-looking characters on “South Park.” And that’s what makes them funny. Jean shimmies up and down very tall trees, inchworm-style. Sometimes he’s nude when he does it. (Don’t worry, parents; the naughty bits are hidden by the bark he’s scraping against.) There’s a horse that’s blatantly just two performers sharing a “horse costume” that’s barely a costume. You can tell a character or creature has died because their eyes become huge X’s. It’s like in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” where they couldn’t afford real horses so the actors just skipped around the English countryside banging coconut halves together to suggest “hoofbeats.”
Cheslik hails from the “if it makes me laugh, I’ll do it” school of comedy filmmaking. The opening section, a musical montage, has just one non-animated character, Jean, whose applejack addiction destroys his life; the rest are drawn in the manner of underground “comix,” seemingly with fat-tipped markers. Period-specific facts and customs collide, Mel Brooks-style, with modernity. The merchant’s daughter tantalizes Jean with a half-inch glimpse of forbidden ankle, then escalates to a pole dance. The beavers occasionally wear clothes, including hardhats and reflective vests. One is seen carrying a clipboard. They appear to have invented electricity, the assembly line, and video surveillance.
Cheslik has cited older forms of movie slapstick as influences, from the silent work of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to the sound-era comedy of The Three Stooges and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (referenced here in the form of two “detective” beavers investigating the string of beaver “murders” committed by Jean; they’re dressed to suggest Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson played by Laurel & Hardy played by beavers). Tews, a high school friend of Cheslik and a filmmaker himself, is a physical comedian of rare precision, giving a performance as vivid and fearless as the best of Jim Carrey and Bruce Campbell. The poster is modeled after one of the posters for the 1963 slapstick epic “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”
Real-world laws of physics rarely apply. Jean is shot through the air like a rocket and survives falling hundreds of feet from trees or being crushed by giant objects and pops back up to have another go. When famished characters stare at a potential food source, there’s a brief dissolve and you see that they are imagining a man-sized turkey drumstick or slice of pepperoni pizza.