{"id":24061,"date":"2026-05-15T16:25:51","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T16:25:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/24061\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T16:25:51","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T16:25:51","slug":"decorado-review-a-mind-bending-animated-film-from-spain-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/24061\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Decorado’ Review: A Mind-Bending Animated Film from Spain"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSeveral characters in \u201cDecorado<\/a>\u201d are on the brink of a mental breakdown. Poverty, unemployment and a constant state of paranoia have driven them to feel like they are trapped inside an artificial set, where every element in their lives feels fake and orchestrated by an ominpresent Big Brother-like business known as ALMA (Almighty Limitless Megacorporative Agency). And their suspicions might not be unfounded. Following \u201cBirdboy: The Forgotten Children\u201d and \u201cUnicorn Wars,\u201d the third feature from Spanish director Alberto V\u00e1zquez (all three of them have won the Goya Award for Best Animated Film) is an expansion of his 2016 short film, also titled \u201cDecorado\u201d (which earned him another Goya). <\/p>\n

\n\tLike its gruesome predecessors, his latest full-length work features adorably designed anthropomorphic animals (and mushrooms) navigating bleak realities and confronting existentialist concerns. The extraordinary dissonance between his films\u2019 classically cartoonish aesthetic and their thematic bleakness makes V\u00e1zquez one of the most singular and consistently surprising animation auteurs working today. As the industry continues to pigeonhole the medium as a vehicle for children\u2019s entertainment, V\u00e1zquez doesn\u2019t only reject such imposition, but dismantles it one despair-fueled film at a time.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt is not a symptom of health to adapt to a sick society,\u201d says a young cat early on in \u201cDecorado,\u201d describing the unease that characters who inhabit this realm are experiencing. The statement is one among many hard-hitting aphorisms that ring devastatingly true for the state of our current world, as late-stage capitalism widens the gap between haves and have-nots, creating unsustainable conditions for millions of people. Our \u201cdecorado,\u201d or set, is inching closer to the Orwellian circumstances that V\u00e1zquez\u2019s creatures endure.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd what\u2019s a married, jobless, middle-aged mouse to do in the face of such circumstances? Perpetually clad in a bathrobe, a symbol of how he\u2019s wasting away without purpose, Arnold (Asier Hormaza) is losing touch with reality. His doctor believes he\u2019s ill with derealization, but he doesn\u2019t trust the pills he\u2019s been prescribed (manufactured by ALMA like everything else). To make matters worse, his cartoonist wife Maria (Aintzane Gamiz) receives a visit from the Depression Fairy (Aintzane Crujeiras), a gray-skinned, dark-haired reinterpretation of Tinker Bell with bags under her eyes, who convinces her their marriage has run its course. Money problems, along with Arnold\u2019s erratic psychological state, have compromised their marriage. Plus, Gregorio (I\u00f1aki Beraetxe), a higher-up at ALMA, is romantically interested in Maria.<\/p>\n

\n\tTimes are tough for everyone, including Ronnie Duck or Pato Roni (voiced by V\u00e1zquez himself), a pathetic knockoff of Disney\u2019s Donald Duck who was once a famous star for ALMA (also Spanish for \u201csoul\u201d), but now finds himself homeless and begging for coins. \u201cThe world is a wonderful stage, but it has a deplorable cast,\u201d declares the ominous Gian Owl (Kandido Uranga), a feared creature that operates as ALMA\u2019s surveillance tool over the nearby forest. There, among the trees, hides a collection of misfits: drug addicted rodents (ALMA provides the illicit drugs), a lonely harp-playing demon, and an inverse mermaid (fish\u2019s head with human legs) aware of her monstrous physiology (these last two become a couple).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe absurdist hopelessness of \u201cDecorado\u201d extracts macabre comedy from every corner of V\u00e1zquez\u2019s idiosyncratic microcosm: desperate for food, the many children of Mr. Mushroom, a salesperson for ALMA, have started eating each other. Meanwhile, Arnold\u2019s imprisoned friend Chicken Crazy\u2019s favorite food is a basket of friend poultry \u2014 cannibalism be damned. At every turn, \u201cDecorado\u201d goes for the most piercing, unexpected turn to further expose the viewer to the deranged environment wrought by the tight grip of ALMA.<\/p>\n

\n\tArnold wants to be free, but the only path to the manufactured happiness available here is selling one\u2019s soul to ALMA and accepting all the anomalies as normal. Not dissimilar to how the need to make a living day in and day out forces most individuals to continue being part of the machine, while war, death, and chaos are delivered to us instantly via screens. The moment one starts perceiving what Arnold and friends undergo as excessively dismal, a quick peak at the live-action cruelty in action around the globe tempers that notion.<\/p>\n

\n\tThrough this one-of-a-kind, endlessly inventive fable, V\u00e1zquez comments on our sedated society, yet he strives for timelessness, rather than resorting to direct references to our modern era. (Technology doesn\u2019t play a significant role here: Instead, the allegorical and the otherworldly reign.) With the help of his deceased \u201cbro\u201d Ramiro (Ander Vild\u00f3sola), summoned back as a specter, Arnold tries to find what\u2019s beyond the forest. His hope is a life that resonates with authentic emotion and not monotonous conformism. Risking it all with Maria by his side, he could either break out of this eerie matrix for good or discover he and everyone he knows are part of a collective production, \u00e0 la \u201cThe Truman Show.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThanks to GKIDS<\/a>, the distributor of independent and daring animation, V\u00e1zquez\u2019s tonally challenging, hand-drawn chronicles have found their way to U.S. audiences. That\u2019s an act of service in an animation landscape where most American studios fear crafting anything remotely unconventional or unequivocally adult-oriented. An argument can be had about what will end up being the \u201cbest\u201d animated feature released in 2026 \u2014 it\u2019s early \u2014 but there\u2019s little chance another film can dethrone \u201cDecorado\u201d as the most mind-bending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Several characters in \u201cDecorado\u201d are on the brink of a mental breakdown. Poverty, unemployment and a constant state…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23746,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[12589,12590,12591,12592,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-24061","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-spain","8":"tag-alberto-vazquez","9":"tag-annecy-animation-film-festival","10":"tag-decorado","11":"tag-gkids","12":"tag-spain"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24061\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}