Spain’s animation industry used the Málaga Festival to make a pointed case for itself: the talent is there, the export reach is proven and the global appetite is real, but unless the country gets better at financing, protecting and scaling its own intellectual property, it will continue creating value that ends up elsewhere.
That was the clear throughline at Global Animation From Spain, one of the first roundtables at the Málaga Festival’s Mafiz New Trends strand, moderated by Carmen Páez, undersecretary at Spain’s Culture Ministry.
Backed by promotion platform Spanish Screenings Content, the panel brought together Raúl Rocha of Illusorium Studios, Manuel Sicilia of Rokyn Animation, Sergio Jiménez of Pinkman TV, Jordi B. Oliva of Imagic TV, and Daisy Cruz, president of MIA, Spain’s Women in Animation assn.
Páez opened with figures from Diboos toon org that underscored animation’s growing weight in Spain’s audiovisual economy. Spain’s animation and VFX sector generated €604 million ($701 million) in 2023, she noted, with 70% of turnover coming from exports. The country has more than 300 companies, though the industrial base remains highly fragmented: 75% is made up of microcompanies and 19% are small businesses. Over 2020-24, Spain produced around 350 animated works, including 33 features, 62 TV seasons and more than 240 shorts.
The numbers point to real scale. What the panelists made clear, however, is that scale has yet to translate into full industrial leverage.
From service strength to IP ownership
Raúl Rocha, of award-winning, Madrid-based Illusorium Studios, behind the Oscar-shortlisted “The Quinta’s Ghost” and whose recent credits also include Prime Video’s “Secret Level,” set the tone by pushing back against one of animation’s oldest perception problems. “Animation is cinema,” he said, “not a genre or a subcategory,” rejecting the persistent tendency to treat it as children’s fare or as a side lane of the screen business. Animation, he argued, is a medium capable of telling any kind of story while generating employment on a very different order from live action. “A single animated feature can keep 200 to 300 people working for two or three years, compared with the far shorter timelines of physical production,” he said.
Rocha’s broader point was strategic. Spain, he explained, cannot keep talking about growth without first deciding what kind of animation power it wants to be. The country is already regarded as highly reliable in service work — competitively priced against the U.S. and often more dependable than lower-cost territories — but that is not the same as controlling the value chain. “Spain needs to decide where it wants to sit globally, then build the policy and business framework to match.”
That concern over ownership ran through nearly every round table intervention. Jordi B. Oliva, whose recent animation credits at Imagic TV include the feature “Josep” and the series “Jimmy and the Magic Key,” argued that Spain’s challenge is no longer simply to participate in international productions but to lead them. “We want to become tractors of projects,” he said, with Spanish companies driving productions worldwide rather than attaching themselves to stronger foreign partners. The real goal, he added, is “to generate IP in Spain,” and keep that IP Spanish from the outset.
Financing, talent and the competitiveness gap
Daisy Cruz made a related case from the standpoint of talent and long-term industry building. “Animation is global,” she said, describing it as a business that travels more easily than live action and offers multiple routes to launch, sell and extend a project. But too often, she estimated, Spanish companies lack the financing tools to industrialize their own ideas and retain control of their rights. The result is that Spain becomes “an exporter of artists” rather than a place where those artists can build stable careers around locally owned creations.
Sergio Jiménez, producer at Pinkman TV, whose credits include Netflix’s “Love, Death + Robots,” steered the conversation into harder industrial terrain. For animation companies, he said, internationalization is not an aspiration but the default setting. “It’s our daily bread,” he said. The real issue is how Spain wants to compete, and what kind of “mental map” international buyers should have when they think of Spanish animation.
Jiménez warned against taking comfort in encouraging topline figures. The sector may look healthy on paper, he said, but the real benchmark is international competitiveness. Measured against Ireland, France, the U.K., Canada or the U.S., Spain still faces structural friction. Companies need “speed, freedom and certainty,” he argued — speed in execution, freedom to operate competitively and legal certainty that allows them to build long-term strategies around development, financing and exports.
That concern fed into one of the session’s sharpest debates: public support, incentives and the line between entrepreneurship and dependency. Several speakers argued that development support is more valuable than aid once projects are already advanced, because development is where durable IP is built. Oliva also flagged a specific weakness in the Spanish framework: the lack of dedicated national backing for animated series, despite the format’s ability to generate sustained employment, travel globally and build long-tail brand value.
AI, authorship and an industry at a crossroads
AI opened another fault line, though not a simple one. Cruz described AI as a tool already entering workflows, acceptable provided it is used ethically and with a clear understanding of process. Rocha took a tougher line, arguing that “ethical AI” is difficult to defend if the underlying datasets have been built on appropriated material. Manuel Sicilia, whose creative track record includes “The Missing Lynx” and “Justin and the Knights of Valour,” sharpened the divide with the session’s most memorable formulation: “Let AI wash the dishes, and let me paint what I paint.” His point was not anti-technology so much as pro-authorship. AI may be useful in handling repetitive tasks, but it should not replace the human intention, detail and creative judgment that define animation at its best.
At its end, Páez framed the debate neatly. Spanish animation’s greatest strength, she suggested, lies in content; its greatest challenges lie in financing, legal security, technology and market structure. No one in Málaga sounded doubtful about Spain’s talent base. The impatience was directed elsewhere: at the lack of industrial tools robust enough to match the sector’s creative ambition.
As the session drew to a close, Oliva summed up the industry’s frustration in a simple appeal: “We are very good at what we do. Let us succeed with it.”
Source: variety.com
