Resumo

Quality animation have high production costs, which has led its creators to find a way to finance these artistically ambitious projects from the very beginning. That is why Walt Disney, through Kay Kemen, sold his main character´s copyright: Mickey Mouse. The sale of products allowed that Mickey Mouse started to be part of homes around the world, generating an effect of veneration for these objects, by oscillating between the fetish and the magical or religious idol. Thus, animation is postulated as a factory that generates pop culture icons.
A phenomenon not exclusive to the West, considering that in Japan there was a parallel one: AstroBoy, the most iconic character of Osamu Tezuka, whose Japanese animated series was the first broadcast in the USA. The benefits derived from the sale of licenses of these characters supported the Japanese studios financially. For this reason, animation merchandising has been one of the main means that allows cultural globalization between East and West for decades. In that way, products like Astroboy, Frozen, Dragon Ball or Pokemon are some of the main exponents.
The importance of merchandising that animation industry has generated in pop culture has led artists to appropriate characters and reinterpret them.
The purpose of this paper is the analysis of the globalizing potential of animation through merchandising.