Tim here. Two things are happening this weekend: one is Valentine's Day, when one's mind naturally turns to talk of romantic movies. The other, infinitely more exciting thing is the release of Fifty Shades of Grey, a movie about sex. Not a movie that contains sex; a movie in which sex is the sole facet of the plot. It's exciting to think of a high-profile wide-release blockbuster basing its whole identity on something adult and mature instead of yet another damn pre-pubescent techno-fantasy, even if FSOG is, by all accounts, not very good. At any rate, with cinematic sex at the forefront of everybody's minds, and since this is our weekly space for talking about the broad world of animation, how could I pass up a chance to talk about sexy cartoons?
The link between sex and animation goes way back – I've seen some silent animated pornography that would probably get me drummed out of Team Experience if I linked to it directly, but if you want to see the absolute weirdest damn thing you have encountered all week, Google "Eveready Harton" and make sure there aren't children around. But it reached its first pinnacle in the form of flapper Betty Boop. [More...]
Her later post-Hays Code reinvention as a sweet-minded innocent is all well and good, but it's her early shots, some of which presented her as some manner of inexplicable sexy dog-human, where you can see the insane id of early '30s sexuality express itself. A personal favorite of mine is the 1931 horror-comedy Bimbo's Initiation (here on YouTube), which presents itself as a surreal nightmare right up until the end reveals it all to be some kind of extravagant flirtation, resulting in what I can only call a theatrical spanking party.
The most legendary of all animated sexpots is the titular (tee-hee, giggle giggle) star of Red Hot Riding Hood, a 1943 short animated at MGM by the equally legendary Tex Avery. It's one of the most beloved short cartoons ever made (it even kicked off a handful of sequels), for reasons beyond libidinousness: as a very early example of post-modernism in American animation, with characters snottily declaring that old-fashioned fairy tales are passé; as a sample of Avery's fluid, elastic character acting at its most inventive, in the Wolf's oversized expressions of lust.
But what made it a hit at the time – particularly among Army soldiers, the only people able to see the film uncut during its – was obviously Red herself, an impossible collection of curves who later inspired (almost directly) Jessica from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, one of many places where the short has been referenced in latter days. Fun activity when you want to feel a little gross: find a 90-year-old man. Then watch the short (here's a really clean copy), and recall than when he was a young man, this probably made him horny.
Not all animated sex was such wink-wink naughtiness involving impossible female forms. Skip ahead to the 1970s, and alongside the new freedoms being explored in live-action cinema, we find mainstream animation beginning to play around with the idea of explicit sex. The most famous example is surely Ralph Bakshi's first feature, Fritz the Cat, in which a feline college student finds political radicalism, drugs, and a constant stream of willing sex partners in Greenwich Village in the late '60s.
The film is, I think, better-known than it is good; the style is rough, the writing rougher, and angry in ways that don't serve it well. The importance of the film is less that it does a particularly good job presenting its subject, more that it opened doors for other films to explore similar territory with more sophistication and insight. Much like Fifty Shades itself, we can hope.
This has been an awfully heteronormative survey, for which I apologize. Explicit but also artistic homosexual animation is harder to scrounge up than it feels like it should be. Most gay characters in animation have been heavily coded and villainous; lesbians are virtually non-existent. And homoerotic animation is nowhere to be found. But I do not want to leave things lopsided, so to wrap things up, I will share one of the erotic Disney Princes paintings by David Kawena, Frozen's Kristoff. You've seen them before, of course, but they're always worth revisiting.
Happy Valentine's Day, everybody!