Transnational anime and Spain’s post-1992 soft power in Gisaku (2005)

Rivera Arnaldos, Antonio

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132425 Copy

Description

Title

Transnational anime and Spain’s post-1992 soft power in Gisaku (2005)

Author(s)

Rivera Arnaldos, Antonio

Issue Date

2025-10-22

Keyword(s)

• Spanish Anime
• Soft Power
• Performance
• Transnationality
• Late Capitalism

Abstract

This paper analyses Gisaku (2005), a Spanish animated film directed by Baltasar Pedrosa, as a strategic exercise in cultural diplomacy and transnational media adaptation. Commissioned through a public competition organized by the Sociedad Estatal para Exposiciones Internacionales (SEEI), Gisaku was created to represent Spain at the 2005 World Expo in Aichi, Japan—an explicit gesture of soft power aimed at fostering cultural proximity through animated media, or, according to SEEI, at “selling the nation’s image”. Importantly, the film emerges at a moment when anime consumption in Spain was becoming widespread through television, home video, and fan communities. Gisaku is also embedded in anime’s transnational cartography in the way it draws from this industrial infrastructure, employing veteran Spanish voice actors known for dubbing Japanese anime. This convergence of local talent and imported aesthetic codes reveals anime not only as a culturally determined form of Japanese popular culture but as a combination of both centralized and decentralized networks of production and convention.

Series/Report Name or Number

The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, volume 6 issue 1

Type of Resource

text

Genre of Resource

Articles

Language

eng

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21900/j.jams.v6.2120

Copyright and License Information

• Copyright 2025 Antonio Rivera Arnaldos
• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0).

Owning Collections