Hentai

Pre-code animation
The earliest cartoon series were based upon popular comic strips, and were directed at family audiences. Most animation produced during the silent film era was not intended to be shown to any specific age group, but occasionally contained humor that was directed at adult audience members, including risqué jokes. The assumed audience of these early cartoons, particularly Looney Tunes, has alternated from their initial unspecific audience, to children, and back to general audiences as "classics".[disputed – discuss] The earliest known instance of censorship in animation occurred when the censorship board of Pennsylvania requested that references to bootlegging be removed from Walt Disney's 1925 short Alice Solves a Puzzle. One of the earliest animated pornographic films was Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure, produced circa 1928. It has often been suggested that the film was produced for a private party in honor of Winsor McCay. Rumors suggest that the film was developed in Cuba years after it was completed, because no lab in New York City would process the film. When a print was screened in San Francisco in the late 1970s, the program notes attributed the animation to George Stallings, George Canata, Rudy Zamora, Sr. and Walter Lantz.

The Motion Picture Association of America, then known as the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association, was established in 1922 as the result of public objection to adult content in films, and a series of guidelines were established, suggesting content that should not be portrayed in films. Until the Hays Code was enforced, many animated shorts featured suggestive content, including sexual innuendo, references to alcohol and drug use, and mild profanity. In the 1933 short Bosko's Picture Show, Bosko appears to use adult words, although it has also been suggested that the character is saying "fox", or even "mug".

The Betty Boop series was known for its use of jokes that would eventually be considered taboo following the enforcement of the Hays Code, including the use of nudity. Betty Boop was initially drawn as a dog, and cast as the girlfriend of another Fleischer character, Bimbo. Betty was redesigned as a human, but the series continued to suggest a love relationship between the two that went farther than the normal relationship between humans and their pets. The short Is My Palm Read contains a scene in which Betty is shown as a child between the ages of four and five, bathing in the nude. In the 1970s, this scene was shown out of context in performances by The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. Concert audiences were not aware that Betty was supposed to be a baby in the sequence.

Another short, Bamboo Isle, contains a sequence in which Betty dances the hula topless, wearing only a lei over her breasts and a grass skirt. According to animator Shamus Culhane, Fleischer Studios and Paramount Pictures were shocked by the sequence, but because it was a major sequence, it could not be cut out of the film. Culhane also states that he does not remember any instance in which the film was censored. Betty's hula animation was reused for a cameo appearance with Popeye the Sailor in his self-titled animated debut short.

Following the enforcement of the Hays Code, Betty's clothing was redesigned, and all future shorts portrayed her with a longer dress which did not portray her physique and sexuality. Shorts produced following the enforcement of the Hays Code were also less surreal in nature, and Betty was portrayed as a rational adult.

After the Hays Code
By 1968, the Hays Office had been eliminated, and the former guidelines were replaced by the Motion Picture Association of America film rating system. The lifting of the Code meant that animated features from other countries could be distributed without censorship, and that censorship would not be required for American productions. Some underground cartoon features from the late 1960s were also aimed at an adult audience, such as Bambi Meets Godzilla (1968), and the anti-war films Escalation (1968), and Mickey Mouse in Vietnam (1969). Escalation in particular is interesting because it was made by Disney animator Ward Kimball, independently from the Disney Studios. Film producer John Magnuson completed an animated short based upon an audio recording of a comedy routine by Lenny Bruce titled Thank You Mask Man (1971), in which The Lone Ranger shocks the residents of the town he saves when he tells them that he wants to have sex with Tonto. The short was made by San Francisco-based company Imagination, Inc. and directed by Jeff Hale, a former member of the National Film Board of Canada. The film was scheduled to premiere on the opening night of Z, as a supplement preceding the main feature, but was not shown. According to a former staff member of the festival, Magnuson ran up the aisle and shouted "They crucified Lenny when he was alive and now that he is dead they are screwing him again!" The festival's director told Magnuson that the producer of Z did not want any short shown that night. Rumors suggested that the wife of one of the festival's financiers hated Bruce, and threatened to withdraw her husband's money if the short was screened. Thank You Mask Man was later shown in art house screenings, and gained a following, but screenings did not perform well enough financially for Magnuson to profit from the film.