Over the course of 2024 -- through an inspired video-on-demand strategy that now includes being free on Youtube, so you have no excuse -- the legend of "Hundreds of Beavers" has spread.
Some of that is down to the movie's indie production cred. "Hundreds of Beavers" was filmed on a microbudget using a Panasonic GH5 in (the now humble!) 1080p, six beaver mascot costumes, a greenscreen, and the Wisconsin snow. Director Mike Cheslik then painstakingly constructed his absurd slapstick fever dream about an applejack salesman turned fur trapper (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who also co-wrote the film) by processing over 1,500 shots in Adobe After Effects. It is proof that if you can get your hands on $150,000, create a detailed shot list, and bribe some friends with alcohol, you can make a goddamn motion picture.
But as much as "Hundreds of Beavers" seems like a handmade homage to the greats of silent comedy, the movie isn't silent. Much of its humor comes out of the work by sound designer Bobb Barito to make the film feel just as much of a Nintendo side-scroller as it does a Buster Keaton setpiece. The sound design gives even the most absurd gags weight, momentum, and a character of their own. And in true "Hundreds of Beavers" fashion, Barito found that he fashioned the best sound effects out of wood.
"Everything in this movie's pretty wooden. Wood is definitely really funny, especially when you distort it, there's like a hollowness to it," Barito told IndieWire. He tested out a bunch of different options (and the Amazon Prime returns policy) but found that wooden kazoos, wooden clapper toys, and other wooden contraptions all were the perfect matches for key, repeated sounds throughout "Hundreds of Beavers." (Kazoos for the flies that hapless trapper Jean Kayak uses as bait; the clapper toys for a chattering sound perfect for sled dogs afraid of wolves; and the wooden puzzle for the beavers' centrifuge in their rocket lab -- seriously, this movie is wild.)
Even when the goal was for something to sound canned and slightly video game or "Looney Tunes" in character, Barito tried to create original sounds that he could customize, stretch, and exaggerate for the exact comedic effect needed. There's cartoon violence lurking behind almost every sequence in "Hundreds of Beavers" and amping up and distorting the sound quality of that violence is what makes those jokes really land.
"Violence sounds funniest when it's really distorted," Barito said. "[Distortion makes effects] sound dated and when things sound dated, even if you're watching an old movie and it's not supposed to be funny, sometimes the sound is a little goofy. But also distortion just makes it seem gigantic, a lot bigger than it actually is. It amplifies the gravity of the situation."
Barito's work helps the film's comedy live in between the exaggerated sonic landscape and the consciously limited visuals. It's that combination, the disconnect between sound and image, that gets "Hundreds of Beavers" to feel like more of a live-action cartoon than anything Disney has done in the last decade. Barito's methods for creating that distortion are pretty resourceful, too.
"If a body [fell], I would run it through a tape deck and just distort it. Tape actually adds a really nice sounding saturation that colors the sound in a cool way. So all the body falls and punches and all that stuff was distorted through a tape deck to give a retro feel and make it sound more hilarious," Barito said.
Barito worked on establishing the key sound effects while Cheslik was still locking the picture edit, which helped finesse some of the timing and some of the impact the sound would have in advance of the nine months that Barito perfected the sound design and the mix. "Mike's philosophy was, 'What's the funniest possible thing we should do, and if it breaks a rule, we should still do it,'" Barito said.
It perhaps wasn't as massive a challenge as dismantling an orchard to build a Beaver space program, but Barito needed to calibrate which key sounds would lead the audience and how and where the sound would land. But he also had a kind of freedom that live-action films don't usually offer sound designers.
"There's a lot of creativity involved in every square inch of the movie. So every single second involved not just work, but experimentation and an exploration of 'what is the funniest possible sound at any given time?'" Barito said. "And it was really fun to do scenes in 5.1 [surround sound], too. I'm not bound by production sound so I can move anything wherever I want to. It's one of those movies where things will happen and I'm not afraid to put [a sound] behind you just to add to the experience."
As much as Cheslik's big and obvious visual effects, Chris Ryan's sledgehammer score, and Tews's Yukon-sized reactions, the sound helps guide the audience's focus through the most chaotic and absurd of sequences. Barito told IndieWire that the fast, furious sled chase towards the end of the film was an example of a broad comedy sequence that's timed very carefully so the score trades off with sound effects to drive the scene's momentum.
"When you're watching a movie, you really only want to be focusing on one thing at a time," Barito said. "[The chase] is a gigantic action scene. There's a whole lot of stuff going on. So my first pass of that had the music pretty low and Mike kept wanting me to bump it up. But the more you bumped up the music, the more chaotic it would get. I had to find the moments where the music could come up and be the main character and then come back down when the sound effects were more center stage."
It's a credit to Barito, however, that the sound effects never feel center stage; the slapstick does.