Adult Animation

A still from Don Hertzfeldt's Rejected

Adult Animation
A Look At How Cartoons Grew Up

For many, animation seems to be strictly the purview of Saturday mornings and Disney features. But through out the history of film, some animators have used the medium as a way to tell dark, complicated and very mature stories. We look at the range of animation for adults. Writer and co-founder of CartoonBrew.com Amid Amidi gives a fascinating introduction to the range of animation for adults. Mike Plante, who has looked at thousands of short films as a programmer for the Sundance Film Festival and CineVegas, considers how many artists create unique and remarkable films with no budget and no staff of animators. And Nick Dawson considers a strain of truly adult animation in his history of x-rated cartoons.


Sex Cels
By Nick Dawson

If you're to trace back the roots of naughty cartoons, you have to start with Buried Treasure, an animated short film sometimes said to be from 1924 but that was more likely made in 1928 or 1929. The 7-minute film has a hero called Eveready Harton (sometimes spelled "Hardon"), a fellow with a very large penis who, throughout the course of the film, lets his manhood lead him into contact (mostly sexual) with a naked woman, an unfortunate man, a farmer, a donkey, a cactus and ultimately a cow. It is a revelation just how bawdy and obscene the film is, however Eveready's libido-led antics are told with a cheeky charm and playful humor that is quickly recognizable as the trademark style of classic slapstick children's cartoons of the 30s and 40s. The reason for this is that Buried Treasure was created (apparently for a stag party in honor of Windsor McCay) by a team of professional animators including Walter Lantz (who later created Woody Woodpecker) and individuals from Max Fleischer's (Betty Boop, Popeye) and Paul Terry's ("Terrytoons") studios. Disney animator Ward Kimball heard that "the laughter almost blew the top off the hotel where they were screening it," however the film was so extreme in its content that it had to be developed in Cuba because no U.S.-based film lab agreed to have anything to do with it.
BETTY BOOP

At the time, films like Buried Treasure and The Further Adventures of Super Screw (a much cruder animated stag film about a very well-endowed man and his aggressive sexual encounters with a gorilla) were being made way, way below the radar, but people like Fleischer were nevertheless introducing sex to cartoons in the Betty Boop series. As she evolved in the early 1930s, Betty established herself as the first sexually aware cartoon character: she wore high heels, short dresses and figure hugging tops, men tried to look down her cleavage, and on more than one occasion she did a topless hula dance, wearing only a lei and a grass skirt. In Chess Nuts (1931) and again in Boop-Oop-A-Doop (1932), attempts are made to take her virginity. In the latter film, she plays a high wire performer who is told she will lose her job if she does not submit to the advances of her boss, the Ringmaster; she attempts to rebuff him by singing "Don't take my Boo-Oop-A-Doop Away," and is saved from an attempted rape by Koko the Clown who hears her plaintive song. A year later, in Betty Boop's Big Boss, Betty is menaced by a different employer while she is working as a secretary, but this time her protests don't last long and the film ends with her happily in the arms of her boss — much to the annoyed consternation of the hordes of who had heard her cries and come to save her.

However, in the mid-1930s changes in the Production Code (also known as the Hays Code), which introduced rigorous moral standards to all Hollywood filmmaking, forced Betty to clean up her act. She changed from a provocatively dressed flapper with her pick of men to a girl who settled down with a boyfriend, wore long dresses, had a cute dog and, ultimately, became much more of a children's cartoon character than one who represented the average progressive girl of the time. The broader impact of the Hays Code's restrictions was that the whole idea of suggestive or salacious cartoons starting to permeate the mainstream and exist as anything more than little-seen underground movies died a very quick death and was an impossibility for a considerable period of time.
POST-CODE REPRESSION

The idea of naughty, sexual animation returned to people's minds in the more permissive 1960s, and was in no small part put there because of the culture of risqué drawings and cartoons which emerged both in gentlemen's magazines such Esquire and Playboy, and also in underground comicbooks. Tijuana bibles, illicitly sold comicbooks featuring recurring characters' sexual exploits, were an underground phenomenon during the first part of the century, however risqué drawings slowly began appearing in legitimate publications. Through the 40s and 50s, Esquire's pin-up drawings by such artists as George Petty and Alberto Vargas were extremely popular, and Vargas was subsequently hired in the late 1950s by Hugh Hefner to produce double-page drawings of girls for Playboy. Hefner's publication pushed the boundaries not only with its photo pictorials but also with its art: the cliché about the magazine is that nobody read the articles, but fortunately minimal reading was required to enjoy the playful, risqué cartoons by such artists as Erich Sokol, Eldon Dedini and Doug Sneyd. While these were stand-alone, simple sketches in the style of New Yorker cartoons, the bar was raised in 1962 by Mad magazine artists Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's Little Annie Fanny who created a lavish, full-color, multi-page comic strip for Hefner about a busty airhead blonde who is constantly preyed on by lustful men. It ran until 1978 and was monthly during the 1960s, a considerable burden that forced Kurtzman to take on a number of assistants, one of which was Robert Crumb.

The overtly political, sexual and scathingly satirical cartoons of Crumb — a counterculture, underground artist thought of as one of the greatest living cartoonists — had a rougher, more chaotic look. Influenced by the Good Girl Art of the 40s and 50s (comicbooks which idolized beautiful, sexually unattainable women such as Torchy and Phantom Lady), Crumb drew his women as big-breasted, feisty and unashamedly sexual and they played an integral role in the narratives of Crumb's breakthrough character, Fritz the Cat. Fritz was everything Crumb aspired to be — confident, dashing and a hit with the ladies — and the comics developed a cult following that inevitably attracted attention from the film community.

BACK IN BUSINESS
In 1972, animator Ralph Bakshi released a screen version of Fritz the Cat that was as daring, both sexually and politically, in the way it portrayed the rebellious, free-love, anti-establishment youth as any live action film. Though the film was disowned by Crumb for diverging from his original vision of the character, it rode its controversy to previously unthinkable success and became the first independent animated film to earn more than $100 million at the box office. It was the first ever X-rated cartoon ("We're not X-rated for nothin', baby!" the tagline read, next to an image of Fritz with his hand down a young cat-girl's top), and its success inspired a sequel, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat (1974), a number of other X-rated animated features and propelled Bakshi to the status of star director.

Bakshi returned to X-rated animation for three more personal projects: Heavy Traffic (1973), about a cartoonist in New York; Coonskin (1975), an examination of 70s race relations; and Hey Good Lookin' (1982), a homage to his childhood in 50s Brooklyn. Both Heavy Traffic and Coonskin blended crude animation with live action photography and saw Bakshi openly courting controversy by unflinchingly representing the racism, misogyny, violence and degradation he saw in the world. The Variety review called Heavy Traffic "a blatant example of hardcore pornography;" Coonskin, a modern revisiting of Disney's Song of the South, was dropped by Paramount for being too edgy for their liking. By the time he made Hey Good Lookin' — a typically Bakshi-esque attempt to puncture the myth of the idyllic 1950s — Bakshi's work was no longer nearly so new or shocking.

The 1970s were, in many ways, the pivotal decade for X-rated animation. Bakshi had broken down the door, and now others were free to take advantage of the new freedoms animators were being allowed. However while Bakshi's work was mostly X-rated because of its edgy commenting on the times, his contemporaries' films were much lighter and more flippantly sexual. Down and Dirty Duck (1974) was a crude and obvious attempt to repeat the success of the first Fritz the Cat movie that had neither the artistic skill or observant eye of the film it was imitating, and yet still became a cult success. However the average opportunistic adult cartoon of the period relied predominantly on pastiche and playing the public's perception of the medium as being purely for kids by tackling well-known stories in a debasing, revisionist manner. The 1972 British short Snow White And The Seven Perverts (later re-released as Some Day My Prince Will Come) established a trend of retelling fairy tales as cartoon pornography, while the 1973 Italian feature Little Dick the Mighty Midget (aka King Dick) quickly followed suit. Arguably the most famous film in this subgenre is Once Upon A Girl… (1976), in which Mother Goose is put on trial for obscenity, the case against her being a collection of fairy tales all featuring large amounts of sex. Directed by Don Jurwich, the film is in many ways a direct descendant of Buried Treasure, as Jurwich was a 15-year veteran of children's animation who decided that for his first film as a director he would do something a little more, well, exciting. 50 years previously, the makers of Buried Treasure returned to their jobs at Disney and the other animation studios because the film was only known about by a handful of people; with Once Upon A Girl…, there was so little stigma attached to directing such a film that Jurwich was fully reintegrated back into kids cartoons, producing episodes of Scooby Doo and Yogi Bear, just a year or so later.

Outside of the U.S., Jean-Paul 'Picha' Walravens and Boris Szulzinger directed the 1975 Jungle Burger (aka Tarzoon), a smutty reworking of Edgar Rice Borroughs' classic Greystoke tale. Picha became Belgium's answer to Ralph Bakshi, twice returning to the field of x-rated cartoons with the prehistoric sex comedy B.C. Rock (1980) and followed it up by going from the dawn of man to the twilight of humanity with the post-apocalyptic The Big Bang (1984), which featured such subtle imagery as women shooting bullets out of their breasts and penis-shaped rockets.
HENTAI

Though Picha sporadically turned the spotlight on Belgium, Japan was the country that truly embraced the idea of X-rated animation. In the years just before Bakshi popularized the form in America, the Japanese Mushi Production studio were a pioneering influence in adult-oriented cartoons. Between 1969 and 1973, director Eiichi Yamamoto and producer Osamu Tezuka teamed on Animerama, a trilogy of erotic animated films — A Thousand & One Nights (1969), Cleopatra (1970) and Belladonna (1973) — which are now referred to as "hentai." The word means "sexually perverted" in Japanese but is now used as a generic term to describe sexually explicit Japanese animation. Hentai has its roots in a long-standing Japanese tradition of bizarre erotic art, such as the famous 1820 woodcut The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife depicting "shokushu goukan" (or tentacle rape), showing a woman having sex with two octopi.

American distributors tried to capitalize on the success of Fritz the Cat by releasing Cleopatra as Cleopatra: Queen of Sex and falsely claiming it had an X certificate, though a contemporary reviewer dismissed it as "kid stuff with naked breasts." However, in the 80s, hentai became considerably more adult while America became much more conservative in its tastes. In the mid-80s, the Japanese began to produce direct-to-video hentai productions (made as TV-style episodes rather than feature-length films), with the first titles, Lolita Anime and Cream Lemon, becoming notable successes. These original video animations (or OVAs) distinguished themselves with their bizarre and extreme storylines: in Cream Lemon, two recurring characters are a brother and sister heading towards an incestuous relationship, while another plotline concerned a girl afraid of sex (because of a spate of rapes in her family) who is "cured" of her fear by a school counselor who makes her strip naked in front of her class and masturbate herself to orgasm, an act which prompts a mass classroom orgy. Hentai is now hugely popular and has a number of well-established subgenres catering to the fetishes including bukkake (mass ejaculation on a woman), futanari (a woman with oversized male genitalia), koonago (women shrunk in size and then tortured), omorashi (the sexualizing of bladder problems) and yiff (sex involving animals with human characteristics).

INTERNET EXPLOSION
While hentai was a purely Japanese phenomenon during the video age, the internet has made it a global craze. If you type "hentai" into Google, you get over 89 million hits — and that is, of course, excluding all Japanese language search results. Hentai has made naughty cartoons more popular than ever, however they are now almost all to be found on DVD on or on the internet rather than on a theater screen near you. The reasons for this are that these forms of distribution are considerably cheaper and, in the case of the web, censorship is almost impossible. While fan fiction (the creation of unofficial sequels to series like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings by enthused readers for their own pleasure) has become a popular trend on the internet, it has a cousin in the world of cartoon pornography where the most recognizable animated characters from children's movies and TV shows are re-imagined engaging in perverted sexual practices (e.g. Bart and Marge Simpson having sex while Homer sleeps obvious next to them). This trend (dare we call it "fan fuck-tion"?) is, of course, in flagrant violation of copyright and is created for profit and the (cough) pleasure of others but interestingly is not a new one, as Tijuana bibles often featured the naughty adventures of such early cartoon heroes as Mickey Mouse and Popeye.

Animated erotica is seen as such a potential growth market that producers of live action porn like Wicked Pictures teamed with the cartoon series Brickhouse Betty (basically a modern day version of Little Annie Fanny), and created an episode, "Stormy Bangs Betty," in which an animated version of real-life porn star Stormy Daniels has a sexual encounter with the fictional heroine. Similarly, porn legend Ron Jeremy appeared in both episodes of the short-lived web series Titans of Justice, about a group of porn stars who develop sex-related superpowers when they are struck by a meteorite. While the majority of animated erotica is aimed at a heterosexual demographic, there is hentai aimed at gay audiences and there was recently a hit online series called The House of Morecock, about a gay paranormal investigator called Jonas Morecock who, regardless of circumstances, ends every webisode by having sex.
CHANGING CARTOON LANDSCAPE

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, no strangers to pushing the boundaries of taste in animation, also tried their hand at a web series, Princess, about a lapdog who observes the depraved sexual activities of the humans around her. In the two 5-minute episodes produced, Parker and Stone managed to cram in a handjob, a blowjob, pay-per-view porn, death by ejaculation and necrophilia as well as a little toilet humor and arguably the most unusual version of a father-son "birds and bees" talk ever. The show was supposed to air on Macromedia's Shockwave site, however the content was so extreme that the planned run of 39 episodes was immediately cancelled. Parker and Stone's vision for the series, a mix of graphic sex and grotesque humor, did not seem to chime with the tastes of consumers, who wanted to be amused or aroused by their pornographic cartoons, not made to feel physically sick. One can see the lessons they learned in their 2004 film, Team America: World Police, which features a hilarious puppet sex scene that is pornographic without ever being stomach-turning.

A film which ably combined humor and the tropes of pornography was Star Ballz, a hentai-style parody of Star Wars, however it is a significant movie for a different reason: In 2001, George Lucas sued the film's producers for trademark and copyright infringement. However U.S. Distict Court Judge Claudia Wilken deemed that the two films were suitably different that consumers would, for example, confuse the hero of Star Ballz, Wank Solo, with Star Wars' Han Solo. Lynn Hale, a spokesperson for Lucasfilm, responded to the ruling by saying that the company felt "strongly that the law does not allow for parody to be a defense to a pornographic use of someone else's intellectual property, especially when that use is directed to children." The Star Ballz producers' comeback? They sued Lucasfilm for $100m for damaging the hentai / cartoon pornography industry by implying it targeted kids rather than adults. While Lucasfilm's position on Star Ballz was most likely legal posturing rather than a genuinely hold opinion, it raised the question about the intended audience for cartoons generally. While it may be the case that the majority of mainstream, publicly consumed cartoons are aimed at children, it is undeniable that there is now a clearly defined — and highly successful — genre of cartoons which are strictly and unambiguously aimed at adults. In short, cartoons have grown up.