'Decorado' (2025) Animation Feature Review": Cartoons in Meta-Crisis

Spanish animation director Alberto Vázquez (Birdboy: The Forgotten Children, Unicorn Wars) has made a name for himself by depicting dystopian worlds in which animals (preferably mice) live under stressful conditions but still claim to be happy.

This Reality TV/Insta setting reality is a perfect drop for his new animation feature 'Decorado' (2025, UniKo, Abano Productions, The Glow Anim Studio / Spain, Portugal), now opening in US theaters in May. Adapted from his 2016 Goya- award-winning short, the film is a telling, impeccably colored homage to 1998's 'The Truman Show'. Here, the short film's (and Coyote Ugly staple) failed Acme corporation is replaced by Alma (Almighty Limitless Megacorporative Agency).

ALMA's headquarters look like a sinister version of Disney's Prince Charming castle, while the main character, Arnold, is an unemployed mouse. His wife, Maria, a freelance illustrator with little confidence in her talents, has to take on many odd jobs. At the same time, Arnold's existential crisis takes the form of feeling watched and of believing that everything around him is a set (decorado). The story unfolds in multiple directions, and we get to know Arnold's friend, Ramiro, and his mysterious trip outside the city's limits to be financially devoured by the ALMA corporation. When Ramiro dies (a giant owl serves as the forest guardian leading to the city exit), Arnold becomes even more suspicious. With his Crazy Chicken friend and the timid Mr. Mushroom, he tries to get to the heart of the matter, at the same time as the Duck Roni cartoon becomes both a friend and a trap for Arnold.

Watch the 'Decorado' English trailer:

'Decorado' works as a parable of late capitalism reality, in which exploitation is not even marked as such (hard work and abuse are relocated to the sewers or the inaccessible forest) but parades as good old conformity. Less epic in scale than 'Unicorn Wars' (and less drug-loaded than 'Birdboy: The Forgotten Children'), 'Decorado' wants to offer a concise overview of everything bad in our corporate society: late-stage unemployment ("no jobs for middle-aged mice"), gentrification, lack of individuality, the ghost of mental illnesses (a very cute depression fairy here). It certainly gives the vibes, making its visual world (José Luís Agreda as art director) a world on the edge: without being too unreal, it is a pastiche of déjà-vu things, homes, and spaces. The lavender color has a field day here, and its inevitable queer overtones (queer here translating conceptually into the border between the real and the fictitious) help the film, which successfully uses cartoonish-like exaggerated expressions only when there's a narrative need to do so.

The film's narrative falters at times, and the many themes investigated (surveillance, housing control, police abuse) seem more episodic than part of a single, coherent life (even if Arnold's life, fake or not, is supposed to be like one). The couple's own relationship trajectory is the film's strongest narrative point, from early worry to abandonment and its development (though the homosocial bonding between Arnold and Ramiro is suppressed here). Definitely not a film for children, 'Decorado' still spends most of its time violence-free, as if violence is, in the meta-era, already boringly watched on somebody else's TV/computer set. That said, some dark comic scenes still surface (like Mr. Mushroom selling his mushroom kid), even though the film as a whole is less a satire and more an uncanny adventure into the wide, unknown set.

Making sure to verify one of the characters' claims that "the world is a wonderful stage, but it has a deplorable cast", the film unites all its characters for the bittersweet ending. Arnold will try consistently to be like Truman; in his case, at least he has many more genuine friends -a fact that makes 'Decorado' somehow more compassionate than Peter Weir's "Truman Show'. The film's defense of animated cartoon characters as part of artistic creation (rather than their commercial exploitation) also reminds us of some basic rules of the trade. 'Decorado' is a wistful, lavender-flavored reminder of the artist and the citizen as an individual unit (rather than as a useless part of an anonymous whole). While at times fragile in its execution, its scope and world are undeniably relevant and neatly decorated.

Vassilis Kroustallis

'Decorado' opens in the US on 15 May 2026. It also screens as part of the official competition of both Animafest Zagreb and Annecy Festivals.

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