A Post-Traumatic Mouse Rejects Reality And His Meds In ‘Decorado’ Clip (EXCLUSIVE)

Alberto Vázquez’s Decorado will hit U.S. theaters on May 15, and ahead of the film’s long-awaited run, we’ve got an exclusive clip that offers a sharp introduction to its off-kilter tone and meticulously artificial yet eerily familiar world.

Known for films like Unicorn Wars and Birdboy: The Forgotten Children, Vázquez returns with what may be his most formally daring and philosophically pointed project yet. The well-received feature has screened at major international festivals and picked up both the Spanish Academy Goya Award for best animated film and last week’s Quirino Award for best animated feature from across Spain, Portugal, and Latin America.

The film follows Arnold, seen in the above clip, a middle-aged mouse spiraling through a quiet existential breakdown as he begins to suspect that the world around him is an elaborate façade. What starts as low-key paranoia escalates into a full-blown crisis of reality, with the narrative blending satire, surrealism, and bleak humor.

The feature expands on Vázquez’s 2016 Goya-winning short of the same name, scaling up its ideas into a longer-form exploration of existential dread and societal absurdity, with a meta undercurrent about the entertainment industry and life in a commodity-driven culture.

Art director José Luis Ágreda has described the film’s visual approach as deliberately artificial, leaning into the idea that everything in Arnold’s world feels staged or constructed. Vázquez has similarly framed the project as an “antifable,” one that reflects contemporary anxieties without offering easy moral resolution.

The result is a film that uses animation to question the structures, both fictional and real, that shape how we see the world. It’s not something that should surprise any fan of Vazquez’s previous work, but this may be his most mature effort to date.

Produced by longtime Vazquez collaborators Iván Miñambres and Chelo Loureiro, Decorado is a Spanish-French co-production between UniKo, Abano Producións, and Autour de Minuit. The film is being distributed in the U.S. by GKIDS, which has built a reputation for championing auteur-driven international animation and bringing boundary-pushing works, including much of Vázquez’s previous work, to wider audiences.