Translating as “set”, as in film set, Decorado is the animated tale of a rat who wants out of the rat race and has more inventiveness in its busy first ten minutes than in the whole of the recent Minions & Monsters. But be warned, it’s bleak, very very bleak.
In a society run entirely by a company called Alma – Almighty Limitless Megacorporative Agency – but you might say Meta, Alphabet or Amazon, disenchanted rat Arnold cannot find work. While his wife works all the hours to keep the show on the road, Arnold keeps seeing evidence of a country falling apart – a once-famous duck, Roni, now a down and out. A chicken whose favourite meal is wings. Terrifying owls. Scary mermaids – top half fish, bottom half human – the list of the bizarre and the unsettling goes on.
Arnold is out of sorts, depressed, says his increasingly desperate wife. Arnold is inclined to agree but harbours a suspicion that everyone around him is kept subdued by the pills, made by Alma, they guzzle. Not him though, even though his wife is trying to persuade him to self-medicate and lighten up like everyone else. Arnold’s doctor tells him he has “derealisation disorder”, and encourages him to take the happy pills – “now with extra happiness”.
What keeps Arnold going is the fantasy of escape, aligned to whispered rumours about a happier place, beyond the woods and over the Mountains of Death. And so one day he sets off with his friends Ramiro and Crazy Chicken (the one who likes wings) to try and find this El Dorado, and the quest structure of the movie snaps into focus.
Director Albert Vázquez claims that his dystopia is influenced by The Truman Show (hence the movie-set notion), Mickey Mouse and Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. I’d add Logan’s Run to that. And The Simpsons – with half a squint Springfield is a hellhole company town run like a fascist state. A touch of Spongebob too, a dark Spongebob.
Is fitting in with the prevailing agenda really that bad, in a world of decreasing options? First World problems? You might say so, and in that respect Decorado is rather old fashioned – the bogey man of conformity is the juice this film runs on. And yet you’ve got to admire Vázquez’s dedication to his cause, and the way he uses contemporary culture to breathe life into his talking point – a use of the multiplane camera that’s very Disney (is that dark forbidding castle Vázquez regularly cuts to a parody of Disney’s?), a way with camera angles that’s filmic, more Wallace and Gromit than Scooby-Doo.
Animated movies tend to be upbeat, often insanely so, but here’s one that’s decided to go in completely the opposite direction. There’s homelessness, problems with drink and drugs, unemployment, the police beating up the poor, people pissing their pants. And it’s unusual to see cartoon characters having sex but they do here.
It’s the sort of movie that’s probably worth two or more viewings, it’s so packed with stuff. One minute a demon with an unusual facility for beautiful music. The next a talking mushroom. The next a fairy called Depression trying to undermine Arnold’s wife.
In the end, Arnold is like Neo in The Matrix – the countercultural mouse who suspects it’s all a bit phoney but is confounded when he discovers he was right all along. The bastards really are all out to get us and paranoid resistance is, it turns out, the entirely appropriate response. Go, Arnold! Quickly and thataway.
Decorado – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
