Erotic animation is the portrayal of erotic and sexually explicit scenes or stories using film, video, or digital animation. It is a subset of the larger field of adult animation, not all of which is sexually explicit, or may include nudity or sexual activity only briefly.
Through much of its history, erotic animation has been a niche genre in North America and Europe. It is more common in Japan, where it is a regular part of a genre of entertainment commonly referred to as hentai. Because most animation is produced either for children for audiences of all ages, erotic animation intended solely for adults has sometimes been subject to criticism and extra scrutiny compared to live-action erotic films.
One of the earliest examples of erotic animation is The Virgin with the Hot Pants, a stag film which opens with an animated sequence featuring an independent penis and testicles pursuing a naked woman and having sex with her, then another sequence of a mouse sexually penetrating a cat.[1] Another early example is Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure, a 6.5-minute silent black-and-white animated film produced in 1928 by three US animation studios, for a private party. It features a man with a large, perpetually erect penis who has various misadventures with other characters and farm animals, plus his penis detaching and doing things on its own.[2]
The Golden Age of Porn, which saw mainstream filmmakers and cinemas tentatively experiment with sexually-explicit material with fully-developed plots and storytelling themes, also saw some renewed interest in similar erotic animation.[3] Examples include Out of an Old Man’s Head (1968) by Per Åhlin and Tage Danielsson,[3] Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle (1975) by Picha and Boris Szulzinger,[3] and Historias de amor y masacre (1979) by Jorge Amorós.[3] Animator Ralph Bakshi produced Fritz the Cat (1972) (based loosely on the comix of Robert Crumb), which was the first animated film to receive an "X" rating in the US.[4] The Italian film Il nano e la strega (released in English as King Dick, 1973) was a Medieval fantasy story told entirely by hand-drawn animation. Once Upon a Girl (1976) featured live-action framing sequences around pornographic versions of well-known fairy tales.[3] Animerama was a series of animated erotic films begun by Osamu Tezuka: A Thousand and One Nights (1969), Cleopatra (1970), and Belladonna of Sadness (1973).[5][6]
Since the 1980s, erotica has been a popular genre of animation in Japan. Erotic Japanese anime – some based on erotic manga, others as original video animation – feature sexually suggestive and explicit sex scenes. (See also: Hentai)
In the early 21st century, producers began applying digital animation technology to erotic material. In 2000, Playboy TV began running the erotic dystopian sci-fi series Dark Justice, which used 3D animation, and ran for 20 episodes.[7][8][9] In 2001, illustrator Joe Phillips released The House of Morecock, a comedic erotic feature film for gay and bisexual male audiences, made using 2D digital animation.[10]
The 2006 short Sex Life of Robots turned to the traditional technique of stop-motion animation to depict the imagined sexual activities of living robots.[11]
Pornography |
| ||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Opposition to pornography |
| ||||||||
Views | |||||||||
Media | |||||||||
Possible effects | |||||||||
People | |||||||||
Events | |||||||||
Miscellaneous | |||||||||
See also |
| ||||||||
Category:Animation * Category:Pornographic films Category:Film genres