Animation is Film Review: Decorado tells us that capitalism is bad, over and over and over again

Film aficionados love to toss around the term "auteur," and to debate which filmmakers are worthy of the label. For a lot of people, I think the word feels like the highest compliment you can give a filmmaker: you have escaped the corporate factory of Hollywood (or another country's equivalent) to become something bold, authentic, and instantly recognizable. In the world of animation, one filmmaker who certainly deserves to be called an auteur is Alberto Vázquez. You can look at a still from one of his movies and immediately know it's one of his.

And, as is the case with any auteur, that might strike fear in your heart, or fill you with joyful anticipation. Either makes sense, because Vázquez creates films that are a unique blend of cute and horrifying. His characters are witnesses to the horrors of the world, the cruel uncaring violence, the hopelessness. This has never been truer than in his latest, Decorado, which is based on a short he made almost a decade ago. A sort of twisted Truman Show take on Disney (or, more broadly, capitalism in general), Decorado is a tough watch, and the first film from Vázquez that I don't particularly like.

The film opens with a helpful definition of the title (in English, translated to "scenery"). Basically, decorado refers to set dressing or mise-en-scene. Things that are placed with thought and purpose. 

And while watching the film, there's no doubt that Vázquez is placing everything with plenty of thought and purpose. Very baldly so. Like, I have rarely seen a movie that is so unconcerned with subtext, or that is so willing to repeat itself over and over again to make sure its message is being heard. It was ironic that I watched this right after ALL YOU NEED IS KILL at Animation is Film, because Decorado proved to be the much more repetitive of the two. 

And that repetition especially grates because Decorado lacks much in the way of shape. It's more of a wagging finger, or wading through a miasma of nihilistic malaise, than anything resembling a story. The characters barely have any sense of direction or purpose. Their goal is a general "figure out what's going on, if something is," rather than anything concrete. There's talk about trying to escape from the world, but not much sense of what that would mean or look like. I get it. I think the film is dealing with a lot of feelings that will resonate with people. I certainly look at the world around me and think how strange it is, how it feels like we're teetering on the edge of something breaking, how I feel incapable of parsing the cosmic strings being pulled by powerful people in far-off places. But the way Decorado tackles these feelings and themes feels like hitting your head against a wall and complaining that you've got a headache.

Our "hero," if you want to call him that, is a mouse named Arnold (not Mickey), who's unemployed, addicted to watching cartoons, and who suspects that the world around him isn't what it seems. He constantly comments on how strange everything is, how nothing makes sense, etc. His whole world is basically controlled by ALMA (Almighty Limitless Megacorporative Agency), a corporation who produces everything, and whose factory/HQ looks like a smoke-spewing Disney castle looming in the distance.

Arnold's wife is trying to make ends meet by being an artist, but she's plagued by depression, personified by a fairy who takes up residence in her studio. Arnold's friends are busy exploring the woods, where monsters live and outcasts from society do ALMA-provided drugs. It keeps them out of the way.

It's a lot of weirdness, and a lot of unpleasantness.

But god, does Vázquez know how to make a movie look good. I love Decorado most when it's just showing us weird little things, or making strange jokes. The dark humor mostly works, and is definitely a welcome reprieve from the film's headier musings, which are so frequent and familiar that I found myself mostly shrugging them off. It's almost a movie I would've enjoyed more on mute, because the character designs, the colors, the angles and darkness of the settings -- there's so much for the eyes to feast on. But it all feels like, ahem, decorado for subject matter that I imagine was better served in the original short.

And I guess that's the main point for me: this doesn't feel like it needed to be a feature-length film. After half an hour, I got what the movie was saying, and I was ready to go home. But it goes on for 95 minutes, and it doesn't reach a satisfying resolution. At one point, it sort of veers into "human connection (specifically love) is the antidote to capitalism" territory, but then it ends up not really believing it. Any kind of genuine emotion is cut off at the knees, plunging the viewer back into the morass of sadness and frustration.

But hey, at least now I know for sure that capitalism is bad.

De-co-ra-doooooo