Decorado Review: Surreal Animation & Confident Worldbuilding Can’t Make Up For A Messy Plot

Despite arguably being better suited for it than for live-action, surrealist storytelling feels so underutilized in the world of animation. That’s not to say there aren’t some notable efforts from the genre out there: Satoshi Kon’s adaptation of Paprika, René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet, and Phil Tippett’s Mad God are a few key standouts.

Another filmmaker who has steadily been carving a name for himself in this niche is that of Alberto Vázquez, with the coming-of-age horror drama Birdboy: The Forgotten Children and the Bambi-meets-Apocalypse Now genre-bender Unicorn Wars garnering significant praise. With his latest outing, Decorado, Vázquez clearly has a lot of ideas on his mind, all stemming from an existentialist place. But, however brilliant and promising some of those concepts are, the lack of a cohesive vision makes for a rocky experience.

Decorado Never Makes Sense Of Its Fourth-Wall-Breaking World

Based on Vázquez’s short film of the same name, Decorado is set in a world of talking animals, where the all-encompassing corporation ALMA reigns supreme over banking, real estate, manufacturing, and the police, among other things. The story primarily centers on Arnold, a middle-aged mouse who has languished in unemployment for nearly a decade, while his wife, Maria, toils away with the hopes of becoming a successful cartoonist.

As they’re faced with the possibility of being evicted from their home, Arnold begins to question the nature of his reality; he and his two best friends find themselves being closely monitored by some of their neighbors. Hoping to find a way out of their oppressive system, he embarks on a mind-boggling journey with major ramifications for himself, Maria, and everyone they know.

To Vázquez’s credit, the first third of Decorado‘s 95-minute runtime is such a hypnotic journey that it’s easy to become hooked by it. Much like the director’s prior films, he and co-writer F. Xavier Manuel Ruiz nicely mete out the intriguing layers of the ALMA-powered society, from the poverty-stricken neighborhoods to the societal outcasts living in the nearby wood addicted to an unspecified drug, as well as some genuine fantastical elements, such as a reverse mermaid and a harp-playing demon.

Even more interesting is the idea that the area Arnold, Maria, and their friends live in may not actually be the real world, but rather an illusion or a set, as the title refers to. The ensuing mystery of what lies beyond their world, and how they can actually escape it, so often feels like a compelling mixture of the surreal terrors of a David Lynch film with the existentialist self-discovery of Jim Carrey’s The Truman Show.

Unfortunately, despite having such a promising core driving his story forward, Vázquez never quite seems to know what he wants to do with this larger concept. Early on, the film rushes through its reality-bending mystery to dive into a fairly poignant reflection on aging, a decaying marriage, and depression. In some ways, Decorado would have been better off finding a very different metaphorical story structure for its philosophical ideas than the one it ultimately takes.

Where its overarching mystery feels most underbaked and unnecessary is in Decorado‘s final act. Without spoiling what happens, Vázquez comes right up to the line of actually explaining the nature of Arnold and Maria’s world, before quite literally turning his characters’ backs on the truth. The very nature of surrealist storytelling may not require laying everything out deliberately for audiences, but the disparate themes of the two stories never quite align.

One of the other issues with Decorado‘s story is just how dour the proceedings are. Vázquez certainly nails the absurdist hilarity of his world of talking animals trapped in a capitalist system, and some of the emotional beats do land with an appropriate, hard-hitting punch. The script is never entirely without some of the surreal humor of its earlier parts, even as the stakes escalate, but things become so dire right through the ending that any sense of a meaningful message at its core is lost.

However, despite its narrative foibles, it’s hard to deny that Decorado‘s gorgeous animation partly compensates for its issues. Feeling largely inspired by everything from early Mickey Mouse cartoons to Fantasia and Betty Boop, there is plenty of unforgettable imagery in the film, particularly its reverse mermaid and a large, malevolent owl. And given that surrealist films are open to a wide range of analyses in the hopes of finding deeper meaning, my door is not entirely closed to revisiting Decorado and trying to better decode Vázquez’s vision.

Decorado hits limited theaters nationwide on May 15.

Release Date

October 24, 2025

Runtime

95 minutes

Director

Alberto Vázquez

Producers

Chelo Loureiro, Nuno Beato

Cast

• 

  Asier Hormaza

  Arnold (voice)

• 

  Aintzane Gamiz

  Maria (voice)