Bruno Edera’s Unfinished History of Pornographic Animation - Aurélie Petit

PANEL 2: WRITING ANIMATION HISTORY Utorak, 9. lipnja, 16:10-16:40

Bruno Edera’s Unfinished History of Pornographic Animation
Aurélie Petit (INRS Montreal)

In 1976, Swiss animation historian Bruno Edera published a short but remarkable article in the Ottawa International Animation Festival issue of Fantasmagorie, cataloguing dozens of erotic and pornographic animated films from Europe, North America, and Japan. Born in 1937, Edera authored Full-Length Animated Feature Films (1977, with Roy Disney), Histoire du cinéma suisse d’animation (1978), and Le cinéma d’animation africain (1993). A collaborator of major animation festivals (including Annecy and Zagreb where he curated and moderated in the 1970s), Edera was referred to by ASIFA as the “Bible of animation”. At a time when animation was increasingly framed as a family-oriented medium, Edera insisted early that pornographic animation should not be relegated to the margins of animation history–thus anticipating the later concerns of porn studies, which frames pornography as a culturally significant media form rather than a marginal genre. This paper argues that Edera’s unfinished project represents one of the earliest attempts to construct a transnational history of pornographic animation and demonstrates how revisiting his archives allows us to rethink animation historiography through a more holistic lens that includes sexually explicit forms of animated production. Edera treated these films as part of a broader transnational history of animated images. Throughout the 1970s, he continued to write about adult animation while developing an ambitious illustrated manuscript titled De l’érotisme à la pornographie… Image par image that sought to document the global history of erotic and pornographic animation. Although the project remained unpublished at the time of his death in 2020, the archival materials he assembled reveal one of the earliest sustained attempts to historicize animated pornography. By revisiting Edera’s largely overlooked research materials that I acquired back in 2022, including a 700-page manuscript and the digitization of more than 150 archival documents from Edera’s personal collection (film stills, press clippings, and distribution materials), this paper outlines a complementary history of animation, the canon from which pornography still remains largely absent. Edera’s archives trace a lineage of sexually explicit animation that extends from early twentieth-century stag cartoons such as Out of Order through the liberalization of sexual representation after the collapse of the Hays Code, the emergence of adult animated features in the 1970s, and the later international circulation of Japanese pornographic animation. This historicization then allows us to reconnect current production practices online to a longer lineage of adult animation, including the structural exclusion of creative porn workers on monetization platforms. Ultimately, this paper opens a collective discussion about how Edera’s unfinished manuscript might be preserved, contextualized, and potentially completed.

Aurélie Petit is a postdoctoral researcher at the Quebec Research Chair on French-Language Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies (INRS) in Montreal, Canada, where she works on the (Re)Generative AI for Culture project. She holds a PhD in Film Studies from Concordia University. As an interdisciplinary social and visual researcher of animation and technology, she explores its intersection with gender and sexuality. During the last years, she has held research positions on the topic of AI, adult content, and online governance within the Canada Research Chair in Digital Regulation at Work and in Life, the AI + Society Initiative, and the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research. She is the Guest Editor for Porn Studies’ Special Issue on “Artificial Intelligence, Pornography, and Sex Work”.