The Bruno Edera Project: Archiving Adult Animation

It is easy to argue that pornographic animation is always transgressive, for it directly confronts hard-won stereotypes that animated films are somehow a children’s medium, or that it is a type of media watched solely for laughs that cannot be taken seriously. To consider the creative potentials of pornographic animation is to therefore theorise the plurality of what animation truly is as a medium. But the very existence of pornographic animation also threatens preconceived ideas that there would be such a thing as authentic pornography, that is a kind of pornography in which performers are actually enjoying themselves and not ‘lying,’ versus faking and over-performing. While this idea of “bad pornography” remains a staple of anti-pornographic discourse (Berg, 2017) as it is used to argue against its very existence, animation directly confronts this assumption as it is, by default, a manufactured media as in the “artificial generation of images” (Manovich, 2016). Following this logic, pornographic animation is necessarily transgressive because it is inherently inauthentic. This impossibility of situating animation within pornography discourse is symptomatic of animation’s isolation from this object: pornographic animation remains an excluded and marginalised sexual media that is too rarely taken into account, both as an adult and as an animated media. 

Even at the university, talking about pornographic animation remains strangely marginal. It is too rarely studied, and its history is poorly preserved and documented, creating a cyclical effect even for those interested: because there is so little written on it (at a few exceptions: for Japanese pornographic animation, see: Patten, 1998; McLelland, 2006; Petit, 2019; Freibert, 2020; Galbraith, 2023. For computer-generated pornography, see: Paasonen, 2019; Saunders, 2019, Petit, 2024), it is complicated and daunting to undertake research without a clearly defined set of sources, which perhaps explains why no one really wants to do it. As a researcher, when I learned that pornographic animation was little studied, I was first excited because it gave me the impression that I would get to work on a unique object and produce new forms of knowledge. But what happened was a realisation that it is actually really frustrating to build without a solid foundation. How can we talk about contemporary CGI pornography on streaming platforms without understanding the larger history of adult animation, beyond the well-archived experimental cinema? I was looking for examples of ‘silly and nasty’ animated pornography – the cartoon’s kind– and I did not know where to start. 

Fig. 1 - Bruno Edera (source: https://asifa.net/in-memoriam-bruno-edera/).

Back in 2019, when I was writing an article on the economic and industrial stakes of French pornographic and erotic animation, Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre offered me the 1976 Ottawa Animation Festival issue of Fantasmagorie as it had a multiple-pages article on pornographic animation by a man called Bruno Edera. It was the first article I had found that talked about explicit animation from an historical and industrial perspective. Instead of film analysis, Edera seemed to be cataloguing every pornographic and erotic film he knew about from Europe, Japan, and North America. Already in 1976, he advocated that pornographic animation should not be relegated to the margins of animation history. As I had never heard of Edera before, I started to investigate.   

I discovered that Bruno Edera was a Swiss animation historian who was highly regarded by the industry for the work he had accomplished throughout the 20th century (Fig. 1). He was born in the 1930s, so not only did he live through the boom of animated films across North America and Europe, but he was at every major festival, did programming for Annecy and Zagreb, and ASIFA (the International Animated Film Association) even referred to Edera as the “bible of animation.” In the 1970s, Edera began to write about adult animation in multiple articles in French, and in everything he published he always mentioned that he had a book project on the subject: a long manuscript of at least 300 pages, with lots of images and archival material that he had collected throughout the years. Slowly but surely, I became fascinated by the possible existence of this book that I could not find, despite reading mentions of it online. The evident obstacle to my search was that Edera had sadly passed away in 2020, right before I started looking for the book. I knew he had donated his archives to the Cinémathèque Suisse, but after consulting the inventory of what he had left them with, I realised he never deposited any of his work on animated pornography because the manuscript was still in progress. I was given his wife’s email address by one of his friends and after a series of exchanges, I found myself sitting in a Montreal café with Edera’s son Daniel Edera, who was passing by the city, as he generously brought with him from Switzerland this 500-page unpublished manuscript and all of his father’s archives.   

When you work on a subject like pornographic animation, one that no one really studies and that people have a hard time taking seriously, there is something really emotional about finding a filiation. Despite years between me and Edera, I was now holding his own personal archive, which opened the possibility for me to continue his work and finally finish it. I am very grateful to his wife and son for their generosity and trust – and for replying to my undoubtedly pretty odd initial email.

Obviously, I have no desire to sanctify Edera either, as his work has plenty of blind spots: written from the perspective of a white, cis-heterosexual European man born in the 1930s, his approach to sexuality definitely lacks queer, and even feminine, perspectives. But still, it can now serve as a springboard for talking about animation and sexuality, and above all: it is a necessary reminder that contemporary adult animation belongs to a longer history. 

In the last twenty years, animated pornography has undergone a complete transformation, not only technically, but also in the way it circulates online. This sudden surge of content due to the industrialization of Japanese pornographic animation in the 1990s and the raise of user-generated adult content has brought with it its share of problems for workers in the industry: they now have to navigate platforms’ policies over sexual content that never take into account the exceptionalism of animated pornography, risking to equal its representation politics to those of live-action content. Animation workers now have the risk of being banned overnight from a platform that suddenly changed its policies on fictional content, then losing their income without the ability to negotiate.

In this first article I read by Edera from 1976, he ends by stating:

“Erotic, or dirty, or pornographic, or curious animated films have always existed, but in a very hidden way, until the cinematic sexual exploitation of the 70s. It would be wrong to believe, however, that it has been democratized: those who know about these films are often privileged cinephiles, festival-goers or financially well-endowed clients of sex shops. It is a pity all the same, because this kind of cinema is not pernicious; it should or can be watched like any other humorous magazine you find on the newsstands. If some films resemble graffiti, others are pure masterpieces: everyone should be able to judge for themselves.”

Pornography is a medium that tells us a lot about society, art, technology and, of course, our relationship to sexuality and to sexualities. It is well documented that the stigmatization of sex work (incarnated by the anti-sex trafficking law FOSTA-SESTA, whose dimmed consequences have extended far beyond its initial U.S. context) always has for the consequence of endangering sex education, the body autonomy, and all those who break out of heteronormative patterns and expectations (McCabe and Conger, 2019; Blunt and Wolf, 2020; Bronstein, 2020). Fifty years on, I think it is time we finally listen to Bruno Edera, and value the history of pornographic animation. As a first step towards preserving his legacy and that of erotic animation, I digitized the archive his family gave me, which you can find here: https://www.aurelie-petit.com/the-bruno-edera-project. This collection reunited more than 150 archive materials of erotic and pornographic animation films from the 20th century curated by Bruno Edera for his unpublished manuscript De l’érotisme à la pornographie… Image par image (From eroticism to pornography… Image by image). This curated selection of animated works from around the world presents an alternative history of film animation, beyond corporate narratives of a sanitized medium. I am currently in the process of transferring the archive to a dedicated data-base platform – once completed, this blog will be updated with the link.

**Article published: July 5, 2024**

References

Berg, Heather. 2017. “Porn Work, Feminist Critique, and the Market for Authenticity.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 3 (March 1, 2017): 669–692.

Blunt, Ariel and Danielle Wolf. 2020. “Erased: The Impact of FOSTA-SESTA and the Removal of Backpage on Sex Workers.” Anti-Trafficking Review 14: 117–121.

Bronstein, Carolyn. 2020. “Pornography, Trans Visibility, and the Demise of Tumblr.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 7, no. 2: 240–254.

Freibert, Finley. 2020. “Embedded Niche Overlap.” The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies 1 (November 15, 2020): 76–112.

Galbraith, Patrick W. 2023. “The Ethics of Imaginary Violence, Part 3: Early Animated Pornography in Japan.” Porn Studies 10, no. 3 (March 6, 2023): 268–82.

Manovich, Lev. 2016. “What Is Digital Cinema?” In Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, eds. Shane Denson and Julia Leyda. 20-50. Falmer: Reframe Books.

McCabe, David, and Kate Conger. 2019. “Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushed It Underground.” The New York Times (December 17, 2019), available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/technology/fosta-sex-trafficking-law.html.

McLelland, Marc. 2006. “A Short History of ‘Hentai.’” Intersections: Gender, History, and Culture in the Asian Context 12 (January), available at: http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue12/mclelland.html?iframe=true&width=100%25&height=100%25.

Paasonen, Susanna. 2019. “Monstrous Resonances: Affect and Animated Pornography.” In How to Do Things with Affects, eds. Ernst van Alphen and Tomáš Jirsa, 143–162. Leiden: Brill.

Patten, Fred. 1998. “The Anime ‘Porn’ Market.” Animation World Network (July 1, 1998), available at: https://www.awn.com/animationworld/anime-porn-market.

Petit, Aurelie. 2019. “Enjeux économiques et industriels de l’animation pornographique et érotique française.” Revue Française des Sciences de l’information et de la Communication, no. 18 (December 1, 2019), available at: https://journals.openedition.org/rfsic/8166.

Saunders, Rebecca. 2019. “Computer-Generated Pornography and Convergence: Animation and Algorithms as New Digital Desire.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 25, no. 2 (March 6, 2019): 241–259.

Biography

Aurélie Petit is a PhD Candidate in the Film Studies department at Concordia University, Montréal. She specializes in the intersection of technology and animation, with a focus on gender and sexuality. She is currently a Doctoral Fellow in AI and Inclusion at the AI + Society Initiative (University of Ottawa), collaborating with Professor Jason Millar and the CRAiEDL on the ethics of synthetic pornography. You can find her on Twitter at @aurelievpetit.