Elena Vásquez Romero

Elena Vásquez Romero was nine years old in 1993 when *Dragon Ball* arrived on Spanish public television, and she spent the next decade as part of the generation for whom Saturday morning meant one specific thing. But where most of her cohort moved on when the era ended, Elena went the other direction: she spent her twenties hunting down the pre-Dragon Ball anime that Spanish television had aired in the 1980s — *Heidi*, *Marco*, *Candy Candy*, *Captain Harlock* — and discovered a completely different tradition she had grown up adjacent to without knowing it.

Her specialty at Otakiva is historical anime: the Toei and Mushi Production output of the 1960s and 70s, the Isao Takahata-directed social realist work of the World Masterpiece Theater, the first wave of genre anime that shaped Spanish childhood television in the 1980s. She holds a degree in Modern History from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and treats anime with the same archival rigor she would apply to any historical document. She is one of very few Spanish-language critics consistently covering the Nippon Animation era. She has 390 entries on MAL, skewed heavily toward pre-2000.

Before Otakiva, Elena was a founding contributor to the Spanish fan magazine *Laserdisc Fanzine* (print, 2009–2015) and has lectured on anime history at Casa Asia in Madrid.

Her personal top five: *Heidi*, *Three Thousand Leagues in Search of Mother*, *Future Boy Conan*, *Rose of Versailles*, and *Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind*.

Based in Lavapiés, Madrid. Contact: [email protected].