Imagined continuities: The story of El Cid as a post-9/11 War on Terror narrative in Filmax/José Pozo’s animated feature film El Cid. La Leyenda

This article analyzes the Spanish-produced and internationally distributed animation film El Cid: The Legend (Pozo 2003) in its pedagogical and ideological dimensions as a medievalist Disney-type genre animation film within the post-9/11 global sociopolitical and media context. Pozo re-signifies the story of El Cid by merging two narratives and temporalities. On one level, the film constructs a narrative about medieval Iberia that incorporates progressive ideas about multicultural convivencia along with more traditionalist views of the Kingdom of Castile as the heroic re-civilizing agent of the Reconquista. The film also includes a Manichean narrative based on the post-Cold War media discourse-narrative of the War on Terror. In this manner, El Cid participates in a process of construction and pedagogical dissemination of a Spanish/western ideological ‘common sense’ that generates particular ways of conceiving and narrating the West’s relation with the Islamic world. This common sense combines liberal-humanist notions of multi-ethnic coexistence with neo-Orientalist imaginaries.