Transnational Anime and Spain’s Post-1992 Soft Power in Gisaku (2005)

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.