In general, the outsourcing of animation production leverages cost-effectiveness and specialized expertise. However, before the subcontracting of animation to Eastern Europe and Asia became a common practice, the outsourcing of Spanish animation was a cheap way for other countries such as the USA and UK to achieve overseas animation. After the arrival of television in 1956, animated advertising in Spain became widespread, leading to the emergence of new studios over the 1960s. Some of them were made up of animators (such as Raúl García, Angel Izquierdo or Juan Ramón Pina) who received specialized training in Belgium, France, or America and returned to establish their own studios in Spain, thereby capitalizing on the demand for outsourcing animation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Another significant trend emerged with animators from large Spanish studios (such as Estudios Moro) who went on to create their own companies (e.g., Cruz Delgado, Robert Balser, and Pablo Nuñez). Within the context of Spanish animation, the impact of outsourcing on the employment and learning conditions of Spanish animators was the consequence of the interconnectedness of mobility patterns and their significance for the industry’s development.
The outsourcing strategies of migrant animators
Spanish migrant animators who trained abroad around the sixties and seventies returned to Spain to found their own studios in the seventies and eighties. Raúl García was the first Spanish animator to work for the Disney Studios, but he always thought of himself as a migrant: “We all thought about returning to build something that did not exist in Spain when we left it, to prevent others like us from having to leave. This is how [the studios] Kandor, Milímetros, Lápiz Azul, SPA, and the Grangel Studio emerged” (García, 2016: 14).
At a time when outsourcing was becoming a central strategy to lower production budgets, Bill Hanna, from Hanna-Barbera Productions, got in contact with Juan Ramón Pina, who in the late sixties was working in Toronto. Pina decided to create a studio in Spain in 1971 with Carlos Alfonso (Yébenes, 2002) under a portmanteau of film and animation: Filman. After two decades of producing limited animation for the Hanna-Barbera studio (collaborating on TV series such as The Flintstones), working at Filman became a valuable training springboard for the upcoming Spanish animators. In this sense, Filman can be seen as a turning point of the transnational mobility of Spanish professionals that persists to this day, including internationally acclaimed animators and producers such as Almu Redondo, Roberto Blaas and Alberto Mielgo (Lang, 2024).
The outsourced animation of independent animators
On the other hand, there were independent animators who set up their own studios in Spain after working for major production companies. Chief among them was the American animator Robert Balser, who directed a UPA-style short (The Hat, 1968) during his stint at the Estudios Moro in Madrid. After his work with Estudios Moro, Balser moved to Barcelona to open the Pegbar Productions in 1972, an exceptional studio in the turbulent market of the Francoist Spain, marked by its characteristic economic ups and downs (Pagès, 2024). Most of Pegbar’s productions were primarily distributed abroad, creating a subservient industry that profited from the cheap and qualified labor of the Barcelona animators. One of the main Pegbar animators was Pepita Pardell. A recent investigation of her archive (Pagès, 2022) has permitted to shed light on the most prominent productions she made for Robert Balser. The American animator, famous for the Yellow Submarine’s groundbreaking animation (1968), introduced in Spain a business practice that was first adopted by American producers in the 1950s: outsourcing.
The first American studio to use foreign labor for animation production was established by Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass in the late 1950s (Brubaker, 2014). In the late sixties and seventies, Rankin-Bass extended its reach to the Japanese market via Topcraft, a company formed in 1972 by ex-staff members of Toei Doga. Topcraft completed three episodes of The Jackson 5ive series (1971-1973), co-animated by Halas and Batchelor in England and Pegbar Productions in Spain. According to Charles Brubaker: “Topcraft officially dissolved in 1985 when the name was changed to Studio Ghibli. The rest, as they say, is history” (Brubaker, 2014). Pegbar studio should also be part of that history because Spanish animators such as Pepita Pardell contributed to The Jackson 5ive’s series.
At Balser’s studio, Pepita Pardell participated in the production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1979), the first animated version of the best-known novel in C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia series, and she also animated for Hanna-Barbera’s Yogi’s Space Race (1978). Found footage from Pardell’s personal archive corroborates her work on Bill Melendez’s The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show (1983-1985). After Balser closed his studio in 1993, he deposited a very diverse amount of material, such as acetates, line tests, advertising proposals and exposure sheets, from Pegbar Productions at the Catalonia Film Archive, and no exhaustive inventory has yet been made. As it has been the case with Pardell’s archive, the material from the Pegbar studio could shed light on an ignored part of the history of outsourced animation in Spain that has deep connections with overseas transnational productions of the same period.
Towards the end of the 20th century, Spanish animation benefitted from the outsourcing practices and the accumulated international experience of migrant animators involved in global co-productions. This trend in transnational mobility of Spanish animators persists to this day. In the nineties, a more complex process ensued as lower-cost international competitors spread in the global market, but by then some Spanish studios, such as Milímetros or Filman, could finally take on the most creative part of the process (conceptualization and preproduction).
References:
Brubaker, Charles. (14 April, 2014). The Japanese Studios of Rankin/Bass. Cartoon Research. https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-japanese-studios-of-rankinbass/
García, Raúl. (2016). Con el lápiz bajo el brazo. Academia. Revista de Cine Español. Especial Animación, 219, 14.
Lang, Jamie. (19 May, 2024). Spanish Animation Booms, Still Looks For Improvement. Variety. https://variety.com/2024/film/global/spanish-animation-booms-improvement-1236009403/
Pagès, Maria. (2017). Interview with Pepita Pardell. Maria Pagès Archive.
Pagès, Maria. (2022, 21-23 September). Animación tradicional en Cataluña: Pepita Pardell y Neus Górriz [Paper presentation]. Congreso Internacional Mujeres y Cine en Iberoamérica: políticas, representaciones, historias, interseccionalidades, Universidad Carlos III, Madrid.
Pagès, Maria. (2024). “The birth of Spanish animation studios and their settlement during the Franco’s dictatorship”. Animation studies 2.0 blog. https://blog.animationstudies.org/?author=272
Yébenes, Pilar. (2002). Cine de animación en España. Ariel.
PhD in Animation by Universitat de Vic- UCC, Maria Pagès has specialized in Spanish animation of the 1940s and 1950s. She organized two Forums on Spanish animation pioneers (2016) and Women in animation (2017). She participated in several congresses about the concurrence of animation and gender perspective. She received a grant to develop a documentary about pioneering Spanish female animator Pepita Pardell (ICEC, 2023). She teaches 2D Animation in CITM, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, and she is a member of the Research Group Dicode. She has published Animation in Spain: Magic Tricks, Drawings on Cels, and CGI with Routledge (2025).
