Playback / Hundreds of Beavers
Hundreds of Beavers · 2022
Intertitles
A modern silent comedy that tells its story with hand-drawn cards, proving intertitles never actually died.
Watch for
- Intertitles and illustrated cards doing the narrating in a film made in the 2020s.
- How the hand-drawn style of the lettering sets the comic tone before a joke has landed.
- The film choosing silent-era grammar on purpose — and what that choice signals about the kind of comedy coming.
A worked reading · COCA
CContention
Cheslik revives silent-era intertitles so that printed language becomes the film's comic voice.
OObservation
Narration and dialogue arrive as hand-drawn cards and illustrated titles cut between the action, with no spoken dialogue at all.
CConnotation
Choosing a form audiences associate with 1920s cinema frames the film as a knowing pastiche, and the crude drawing style promises slapstick rather than solemnity.
AAudience
We are told how to watch — as a cartoon, not a drama — and we read the printed cards as jokes in their own right.
Your turn
- Why would a film made in the 2020s choose to use intertitles?
- How does the drawing style of the cards set your expectations for the comedy?
- Compare these cards with the Metropolis intertitles. What has changed, and what hasn't?
For teachers
A delight, and the perfect partner to Metropolis — same technique, a century apart, completely different tone. Shows students that codes are choices, not eras. Classroom-friendly slapstick.
