If you’re trying to escape from Anywhere, perhaps the only alternative is… nowhere. This is the agonizing reality that director Alberto Vázquez (Birdboy, Unicorn Wars) presents to the characters of Decorado, the feature-length adaptation of his eponymous short film from 2016. Married couple Arnold (Asier Hormaza) and María (Aintzane Gamiz), two adult mice with stubby bodies and perfectly round heads, are mired in ennui and living on the edge of precarity. Arnold, sporting a red bathrobe and wristwatch with no hands, has been unemployed for years, while María struggles to support them as an illustrator. They’re surrounded by nosy, hypocritical neighbors and, particularly for Arnold, nagged by a persistent and unsettling feeling of being watched. This sense of surveillance is amplified by one of the film’s darkest and funniest scenes, when all the signs downtown (“No Jobs for Middle Aged Mice”) seem designed to crater his already low self-esteem.
Like all of Anywhere’s residents, Arnold and María live in the shadow of the all-encompassing, all-knowing monolith known as ALMA, or the Almighty Limitless Megacorporative Agency. Perched high above the rest of the city in a castle-like structure whose elegant spires pump out noxious fumes, ALMA produces everything from SSRIs to the drugs that come in baggies instead of orange vials. Futurama fans will recognize MomCorp in ALMA (which, winkingly, is Spanish for “soul”), although the latter is run by a suave older mouse named Gregorio instead of a sickly-sweet caricature of a loving grandma. Another bleakly funny animated touchstone might be Bojack Horseman, the Netflix series that also featured anthropomorphized animals with stalled careers.
The film’s preoccupation with artifice is foretold by its title (a decorado is a theatrical set) and one of its first scenes, where the sight of birds twittering outside is overlaid with the artificial chirping of a phone alarm clock. For his part, Arnold is more philosophically inclined than most of Anywhere’s residents, but this is not the sort of town that welcomes introspection. In fact, when he is cursorily diagnosed with “derealization,” this diagnosis only pushes him further into dislocation and helplessness. Together with his friends, the beer-guzzling Ramiro and meek Mr. Mushroom, the trio tries to envision an escape from Anywhere’s suffocating social and financial expectations. At the same time, they must evade a giant owl that routinely terrorizes the town, the shadow of its huge wings as ominous as the past-due letters that arrive in Arnold’s mailbox.
Vazquez, who is also a comic book artist, takes evident joy in fleshing out the film’s various settings, from the run-down houses in Arnold and María’s neighborhood to the mysterious forest on the edge of town where the city’s down-and-out take refuge. In Vazquez’s hands, the natural world is occasionally beautiful but mostly menacing, a place where flora and fauna coexist (not always peacefully) alongside malevolent fairies, melancholy demons, and grotesque mermaids. Anguished faces deteriorate into a miasma of wrinkles, dark circles, and worry lines, vividly illustrating the emotional toll of life on the brink. In Anywhere, anything can happen: a self-important pigeon gets run over mid-sentence, the snarling thugs beating up a beggar are actually cops, and the beggar is actually a washed-up former TV star.
Once the film gets going, these reversals are neither entirely surprising nor subtle. It’s especially easy to read ALMA as a nefarious inevitability of late-stage capitalism, given the way its tentacles reach into every imaginable industry and color all possible experiences. Its branding is slapped on so many products that the hapless Mr. Mushroom is punished for the worst thing an ALMA salesman can do — peddling unauthorized merchandise. Yet this monolithic megacorp, with its vast surveillance apparatus and total decision-making authority, is indistinguishable from the state itself. As Arnold comes to realize, all the world is a stage, and ALMA serves as writer, producer, director, and even audience. As Arnold uncovers the layers of Anywhere’s artifice, his existential struggle is to safeguard the love he feels for María and the sanctity of their shared history against the irresistible forces of pre-packaged conformity. In the face of this decorado’s all-consuming presence, it turns out that the “deplorable cast” is merely window dressing.
DIRECTOR: Alberto Vázquez; CAST: Asier Hormaza, Aintzane Gamiz, Kandido Uranga, Mikel Garmendia; DISTRIBUTOR: GKIDS; IN THEATERS: May 15; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
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