‘Decorated’: the cuqui world enters depression | Cinema: premieres and reviews

In his essay The power of the cute, Simon May pointed out how behind what “cute” —a term that brings together the aesthetic trend of the tender, cute and adorable— hides many of the fears and concerns of this time. According to that theory, beneath the cuteness and its appearance of round pink happiness, lies everything that is not going well.

In his previous animated film, Unicorn Wars, Alberto Vázquez contrasted his care bears with a violent and warlike world. In his new feature film, Decoratedthey are cute little mice (the same round faces, the same big eyes between childish noses) who face a complex network of small miseries, at work, as a couple…

Decorated part of the short film of the same name (winner of the Goya in 2017) to tell the story of María and Arnold, a couple faced with an existential crisis in which everything fits, even too much. Self-help film, romantic drama, dystopian horror, story of broken toys, spiritual adventure, capitalist apocalypse, mirror of depressions and ghosts… that overload in the backpack of Decorated It is its weakest point.

All in all, Vázquez manages to convey a very particular restlessness, and his tender drawings become vehicles of a squalor that makes him uncomfortable. In Decorated, Arnold is the main character. An unemployed mouse that little by little falls into depression and abandonment. The world around him is no wonder. It is an Orwellian reality with echoes to The Truman Show in which a universe full of references to the present unfolds.

Among the best characters are a little setite and her children (peddlers of Alma’s products, the corporation that governs everything, with echoes of well-known multinationals) who suffer all kinds of humiliations. This collateral plot, like that of the friendship with the ghost Ramiro, works better than the couple crisis that underpins the film. Fable about the existential emptiness of the present, Decorated It is caustic in its search for a way out for its characters, a dark labyrinth that places the viewer before the failure of a world in which there is no way out even for the most tender.