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DIRECTED BY: Alberto Vázquez

FEATURING: Voices of Asier Hormaza, Aintzane Gamiz, Kandido Uranga (original Spanish); David Goldstein, Marissa Parness, Peter Giles (English dub)

PLOT: Arnold, a mouse, feels like he’s trapped in an artificial reality.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Decorado combines two seemingly out of place aesthetics—cute cartoons and psychodrama—but also uses an Orwellian dystopia as camouflage to discuss themes that are far more existential in nature.

COMMENTS:  Alberto Vázquez’s animations distinctly combine the cartoonish with a heavy dose of pessimism and existentialist dread. His latest feature effort, expanded from his eponymous short film, is no different. What is new is the ambiguous nature of the surrounding environment, a perfect metaphor for the confusion and angst of these anthropomorphic animals. But let’s start from the beginning.

The story revolves around mouse Arnold and his wife Maria. They live in a town structured like a miniature capitalist system, where a major corporation named ALMA governs everything. Both mice are social outcasts. Arnold remains unemployed for years, while Maria struggles to build a career as a graphic designer. Feeling exhausted by this way of life, Arnold wants to believe there is something more, a figurative and/or literal way of escape. A dark forest surrounds his hometown, and he can’t stop wondering about what might exist beyond that. Perhaps somewhere beyond lies the ideal world of absolute freedom and truth that he desperately desires.

The parabolic tone of this plot is clear. Arnold lives in an Orwellian nightmare where extensive surveillance is the norm, everyone takes medicines to stay calm and happy, and class differences are tremendous. As Arnold rebels, he finds companionship in an eclectic variety of characters, but at the same time he pays a price, by discovering the true nature of his cage.

This is not a social parable, even if it starts like one. It existentialist—almost nihilistic—in nature. Later revelations recall The Truman Show (1998), as the line between what is real and what is a facade starts to blur. That film, however, had a clear ending and catharsis, offering a concrete explanation for its world. Here, no easy answers are given. As the owl-guardian of the forest says, in this case “the (whole) World is a stage” and, perhaps, there is nothing beyond that other than the vastness of a cosmic void.

From a philosophical standpoint, Decorado has some parallelisms with Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s The Holy Mountain (1973): both movies deconstruct ideas regarding salvation and a ultimate truth by constantly reminding us, in a Brechtian way, that everything is  artificial, props and cardboard cutouts on a theatrical stage. Decorado is undoubtedly darker in tone, however, and not so explicitly didactic.

Decorado‘s narrative also works as a portrait of psychopathology. Vázquez’s works are always interested  in exploring the world of the mentally ill. In Birdboy (2015) a teenage boy shows symptoms of schizophrenia; Unicorn Wars (2022) studies the mindset of a sociopath. Here, Arnold’s wife struggles with depression—in the form of a Tinker Bell-like fairy that follows her around—while he is diagnosed with derealization disorder. Clinically defined, derealization (also known as depersonalization or dissociation) is a sense of detachment from reality—a gut feeling that something is off about the world. Decorado can therefore also be interpreted, through a strictly psychological prism, as an externalization of Arnold’s disorder. A work of art can be read in many ways, after all.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This paranoid and dystopian vision of life under capitalism is grim but funny—surreally cartoonish yet filled with sarcastic adult ennui, like Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat In Space punctuated by a dose of Happy Tree Friends‘ goofy gore, eventually approaching something fearful and self-referential enough to evoke the existential absurdity of Charlie Kaufman.”–Jacob Oller, AV Club (contemporaneous)