Soul Crushing
comic artist Alberto Vázquez takes aim at some easy targets in his short-to-feature existential meditation. He’s not wrong.
Decorado
Director: Alberto Vázquez • Writers: Alberto Vázquez, F Xavier Manuel Ruiz, based on the short by Vázquez
Starring [English]: David Goldstein, Marissa Parness, Brian Villalobos, Bryce Papenbrook
Spain / Portugal • 1hr 35mins
Opens Hong Kong September 3 • IIB
Grade: B
Spanish graphic novelist Alberto Vázquez’s Decorado isn’t exactly, shall we say, light of touch, but all props to him for making an animated saga worthy of a gummy, which is saying a lot. In Decorado, unemployed factory worker Arnold Mouse (David Goldstein) and his illustrator wife Maria (Marissa Parness) are struggling to get by in Anywhere City (get it?), ruled over by the ungodly hybrid of a big business and a city council, ALMA – the Almighty Limitless Megacorporative Agency. If you don’t recognise Amazon I don’t know what to say. Anyway, Arnold encounters one dilemma after another as he navigates his mid-life crisis, and eventually finds himself questioning the nature of his reality. Cue psychedelic imagery, and I hope that gummy’s kicked in.
Decorado was also produced as a short film way back in 2016, before the first Trump clusterfuck, before Wall Street started to literally control our lives and before we (or those who care) started to question the veracity of what we saw on the increasingly bone-headed interwebs and Instagram (cat videos excepted). So it makes sense for Vázquez to revisit the truly dystopian material for a black comedy-horror psycho-thriller – in cartoons! – about the banality of modern late-stage capitalism life. There’s a little Brazil in here, and The Truman Show and Logan’s Run, and the internal logic wobbles at bit as Vázquez and co-writer F Xavier Manuel Ruiz try to justify an action-packed third act, but Decorado does finds its way to being an emotionally gutting anti-corporate screed in the end. More of these please – assuming the powers that be let us see them.
Anybody, anywhere
For… reasons we’re getting the English dub here, with a cast replacing the original Spanish actors (Asier Hormaza, Aintzane Gamiz and Ander Vildósola) that does a solid job of conveying the crushing ennui and resignation felt by Anywhere’s residents. The story pivots on Arnold and Maria’s disintegrating marriage, under stress from his lack of work, dwindling savings, her crushing insecurity and encroaching, crippling depression. Nice. Arnold’s existential angst is compounded by finding his childhood idol, the relentlessly chipper Roni Duck (Brian Maillard) laying in dirty alley with track marks up his arms, and local travelling salesman Mr Mushroom’s (Bryce Papenbrook) pleas tio buy anything because his seven children are starving. It’s grim stuff, made grimmer by Mr Gregory (Rene Mujica), ALMA’s deputy director and gleefully heavy-handed rival for Maria’s affection. All this leads to Arnold’s best mates Ramiro Rat (Brian Villalobos) and Crazy Chicken (Jon Allen) roping him into a search for a mythic way out of Anywhere that lies beyond the forbidden forest. The forest is dangerous and is home to an all-seeing, murderous owl that keeps everyone in line and helps Gregory track – and crush – dissent and unions, and manipulate the media to prevent everyone fom getting too feisty or informed. In the off chance they do, ALMA has a trigger-happy goon squad to deploy.
Why on Earth anyone would think Decorado speaks to audiences at this moment in time is anyone’s guess, but Vázquez’s hand drawn 2D surreality (or ultra-reality depending on your POV) does, despite it being weighed down by low-hanging fruit. Amazon and Jeff Bezos and Disney and hyper-capitalism and AI-powered anti-reality are some of 2026’s easiest targets, so when the story’s own in-world rules start to falter, it stands out; there’s nothing to distract from it. Why is the Killer Owl an owl? Why doesn’t it walk and talk like the rest of the animal characters? As usual, why is Maria mostly a mechanism for Arnold’s progress – particulary when the potential is there to put more meat on her bones?
But as adult animation goes Decorado is as visually impressive as it is resonant. Vázquez’s colourful, cartoon-forward aesthetic makes the story’s randomly placed deaths, heightened forest weirdness and horned-up demon and his mermaid girlfriend the kind of crackpot respites from the relentless bleakness the movie needs. Without them Decorado is just a corporate micro-management slog with a pervasive mood of helplessness that runs up to an ambiguously downbeat finale. The closing frames, curious as they are, took too much work to get to, cramming too much action into a narrative that didn’t need it. Conspiracies are fine, but Decorado was at its most engaging when Arnold and Maria and Ramiro were fighting their way through everyday doldrums with fingers crossed the misery would end soon. It turns out that “alma” means “soul” in Spanish, a fitting title for a psychotic little film about having it crushed.