Decorado

In 2010, Spanish artist Alberto Vázquez published a comic, which he adapted into an animated short in 2017. Although a subsequent series never materialised, the ideas he had been developing ended up forming the basis for this animated feature.

Thus, fifteen years after its conception, Decorado has found its final form. What started out as a darkly humorous and black-and-white concept about someone having the ‘Black Mirror meets The Truman Show’-like feeling his whole world is nothing but a stage set, over the years developed into an existential and full-colour fable. Because the idea that our hero, the chronically miserable mouse Arnold, might simply be completely paranoid – his egocentric introversion completely exhausting his hard-working partner – is now taken much more seriously.

Only sporadically do we get the insane, over-the-top outbursts of gore we saw in Vázquez’ Unicorn Wars (2022). This time, most of the violence in this (still darkly humorous) drama is much more grounded. Yet even more important is the psychological drama involving Arnold, his partner and his friends.

And so, the film references On the Waterfront (1954) as confidently as it does Disney’s Snow White (1937). Asked for his inspirations, Vázquez cites Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in one breath with Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973). The result: here, Tinker Bell is called ‘Depression’. Or is it all but a dream? No, says Arnold’s doctor: “In this world it’s impossible to dream.”