The Outer Limits

Journeys fo the farthest reaches of interactive entertainment

- ALEX SPENCER

Ever since Nintendo announced the film adaptation of Legend Of Zelda, I – like most right-thinking people – have been dead against the idea. More than the iconography, certainly more than the story, each of those games at its best is a new box of toys shipped over from Kyoto. Zelda is so natively a thing of play that it’d be like adapting… well, Hollywood’s post-Barbie gold rush has made it rather hard to find an appropriately hyperbolic analogy (an Uno movie, really?), so let’s just say: like adapting something that should not be adapted.

Or so I thought. Please notify Shigeru Miyamoto, and everyone in Hollywood, that I have changed my stance. There can be a Legend Of Zelda film, as long as it’s directed by Mike Cheslik. Cheslik’s Hundreds Of Beavers – a black-and-white silent comedy with touches of classic animation, with a cast mostly dressed in animal-mascot costumes – might not be the most obvious audition piece for that particular job.

The film borrows as much from video-games as from Buster Keaton or Chuck Jones, but its eye there is primarily on Nintendo’s other big hitter. “Besides the old Popeye and Donald Duck cartoons, [Cheslik’s] biggest influence is probably