Segundo de Chomón is considered the pioneer of Spanish animation, with the stop-motion shorts he made in France for Pathé starting with La maison hantée (1907).
It seemed to catch on, and three films (El intrépido Raúl, Pipo y Pipa en busca de Cocolín and Arte, amor y estacazos) were created by different teams in the following year's first months, but the Civil War's outbreak put a halt to all animated productions.
In the 1980s the feature production was diversified under the new autonomous system and films based in the local traditions were produced, such as The Magic Pumpkin (Juan Bautista Berasategi, 1985) in Euskadi and Despertaferro (Jordi Amorós, 1990) in Catalonia.
"Katy The Caterpillar" (1984) was a coproduction with Mexico and The Town Musicians of Bremen (Cruz Delgado, 1988), spun a popular series, Los Trotamúsicos (1989), was the first animation film prized at the Goya Awards.
[4] Feature production didn't make an impact for most of the 1990s, and only one Goya award was granted in the first half of the decade, for The Return of the North Wind (Maite Ruiz de Austri, 1993).
Some of the most ambitious projects in more recent years were produced just in Spain with the backing of television networks, such as Mediaset in Lightbox Entertainment's Tad, the Lost Explorer (2012) and Capture the Flag (2015).
Meanwhile live-action directors Juan José Campanella and Javier Fesser entered the CGI animation field with Underdogs (2013) and Mortadelo and Filemon: Mission Implausible (2014) respectively.
Cruz Delgado's series Don Quixote of La Mancha (1979–81) was the first large success in Spanish animation for television, which boosted in the following years.