Decorado
— Kevin Fullam
And here I thought Sirāt was bleak! That desperate, calamitous trek through the Moroccan desert seems positively halcyon compared to the wall-to-wall beatdown suffered by poor Arnold, a mouse trying to survive the animated dystopia of Decorado.
When we first meet Arnold, he’s trudging out of a hovel in the slums of a city called Anywhere. His marriage to María, an increasingly frustrated illustrator, is crumbling. He’s penniless, and has been unemployed as long as he can remember. The police seem to exist only to harass the locals. And the poor live under the shadow and smokestacks of A.L.M.A. — Almighty Limitless Megacorporative Agency. Er… not too subtle there, eh?
All the while, Arnold is plagued by a nagging feeling that the world around him isn’t quite “real.” His friend Ramiro, who lives in an even more dilapidated home at the edge of the city, fans the flames of Arnold’s suspicions by raising the issue of escape. Why can’t anyone leave? What lies beyond Anywhere? Ramiro has been crafting a map of the forest at the outskirts of town, however, and suggests to Arnold that he’s solved the maze and found a potential exit.
After Ramiro is mysteriously killed, Arnold is inspired to use the map. He finds that the forest is populated by all sorts of horrors: monsters, junkies supplied with ALMA drugs, and a giant killer owl that serves as the ultimate sentry. Stymied, he returns to town and tries to patch things up with María, who’s since acquired a personal fairy explicitly named Depression. And if that isn’t challenging enough, the director of ALMA has started to wine and dine María, tempting her to leave Arnold in exchange for the promise of a luxurious life and career.
Will ALMA and its overseer receive their comeuppance? Does Anywhere exist only as a giant studio set? And if there is indeed a “final curtain” in this sinister Oz, what happens when Arnold reaches it?
It’s no secret that the writer/director of Decorado, Alberto Vázquez, intended the film as a mashup of sorts — he’s mentioned The Truman Show and Scenes From a Marriage as clear influences. “It’s a kind of existential crisis, one that we go through at some point. Arnold feels that his partner, his friends, his family, that everything around him, his life, in short, is meaningless… Although the protagonists are mice, what they feel and think is very human.” Being a mouse is a convenient proxy for Arnold, since mice are typically creatures with little agency, but the animals of Anywhere seem to have the same needs as good ol’ Earthlings: homes, legal tender, and a sense of purpose.
The question is whether the amalgamation of themes is greater than the sum of its parts… or less. When it comes to exploring the issue of a “curated,” artificial existence, The Truman Show does a deep dive into the challenges of maintaining a fictional city to hoodwink a single mark for the entertainment of millions of viewers. Regarding relationship difficulties and the internal struggles that come with fleeting personal ambitions, there’s Blue Valentine and Revolutionary Road, which highlight the bumps and bruises of marriages once the honeymoons wear off. And if you’re looking to delve into an existential crisis within an animated world, may I direct you to the Don Hertzfeldt classic, It’s Such a Beautiful Day. (Hertzfeldt’s stick-figure animation style is as bare-bones as it gets, but serves as a conduit to all sorts of philosophical reflections.)
When a bunch of disparate tropes are crammed into a story, there’s a risk that they wind up being painted with broad brushes as a necessity of moving the plot along. The result? Questions and unresolved plot threads.
Arnold seems like an inquisitive, curious individual, but what did he "want" out of life before stopping to contemplate the nature of his existence? There's a brief flashback where he reflects on the time when he and his wife were making coat hangers (!) for ALMA; surprisingly, it's portrayed as an idyllic existence! Then he and María get caught spraying anti-ALMA graffiti, they lose their jobs, and their hardships begin.
Relatedly, Vázquez clearly has an ax to grind with the sorts of predictable targets — namely, corporations and police — that seem to be low-hanging fruit these days. They’re not necessarily gripes that I share, but that’s fine; my issue is that the caricatures are rather obvious. To start with, would a truly insidious corporation really want its logo plastered on everything unholy, including cocaine? When things are that over-the-top, it’s hard to take the author’s world seriously.
And, setting aside, we were supposed to take Decorado seriously… um, right? Vázquez intended the film as a dark comedy, but one would be hard-pressed to recall a grimmer picture, animated or otherwise. It’s not a case where Arnold navigates his day-to-day life with a sense of humor about his dreary lot. In fact, the only time he does lighten up for a bit is when he’s under the influence of ALMA-brand antidepressants.
At the conclusion of The Truman Show, the title character, in spite of all the hurdles put forth by his unseen handlers, has set sail to leave his hometown island in the midst of a raging storm. We’re invested. And there’s a payoff.
Ultimately, do we care whether or not Arnold is nothing more than a character in a manufactured drama? Was the finale worth being battered by 95 minutes of gloom? Was there a payoff at all? It’s surprising to me that this mouse didn’t wear a thousand-yard stare by the time he reached the closing curtain; certainly, filmgoers could be forgiven if they did.