Suzumi-bune

Dating back to 1932, the first hentai anime is a short movie set during the Edo period, and yes, that sentence is completely real. Suzumi-bune takes place at the Kawabiraki festival on the Kanda River, where the start of boating season draws crowds — including a wealthy merchant's daughter who catches the eye of a smooth-talking stranger. What follows is a brief, bawdy encounter with very festival-appropriate chaos thrown in. The tone is less shocking than you'd expect and more... playfully mischievous, leaning into the comedic sensibilities of Edo-era storytelling rather than anything grim. The real reason to watch this is purely historical curiosity. The art style is lifted almost directly from ukiyo-e woodblock prints — that classic floating-world aesthetic you'd recognize from Hokusai — animated with surprisingly charming early technique. It's fascinating in the same way early experimental animation always is, except this one went somewhere most animators weren't willing to go in 1932. If you've seen films like A Thousand and One Nights or Belladonna of Sadness and appreciated how adult animation can carry a distinct cultural fingerprint, this fits into that same conversation. It's a single short movie, so the time investment is minimal. Think of it less as entertainment and more as a genuinely weird historical footnote — the kind of thing that makes you pause and reconsider what you thought you knew about animation history.