Name: Decorado
Director: Alberto Vazquez
Released: 2025
Duration: 95 min

Unicorn Wars director Alberto Vázquez returns with another visionary, Goya Award–winning animated polemic.

Middle-aged mouse Arnold is unemployed, and his cartoonist wife María’s salary sometimes falls short when the bills arrive. As if these pressures weren’t bad enough, he’s also convinced that the town they live in is a theatre set (or decorado in Spanish). With the all-powerful Almighty Limitless Megacorporative Agency tightening its grip on the townsfolk, Arnold risks losing both his home and his marriage – so he enlists the ghost of his recently deceased best friend Ramiro and the outcast Mr. Mushroom, and sets out to reclaim what’s left of his life.

Expanding on Alberto Vázquez’s lauded short of the same name (MIFF 2016), Decorado swaps out the overt violence of his award-winning feature debut Unicorn Wars (MIFF 2022) for a seething sense of menace, capturing the paranoia that can come from being a mere hamster (or mouse) on a wheel. Evoking The Truman Show, Nineteen Eighty-Four and classic Disney, the film is visually bold and narratively breathtaking, tapping into the existential, industrial and psychological crises of a present riddled with inequality and fake news. If all the world’s a stage, this dystopian work dares to ask, are we its actors obliged to keep the show going on?

“The Spanish animated film of the year … The film sails through the viewer’s retina like a jovial and entertaining nightmare, just the way the sourest, darkest and most pleasurable of dreams would do.” – El Mundo