The Erotic Anime Movie Guide

by Helen McCarthy and Jonathan Clements

"a must for all anime fans"
-- SFX

"painstakingly researched and packed with detail… intelligently discusses the complexities of a unique theatrical format"
-- Midwest Book Review

"an exhaustive guide… a serious investigation of the genre with incredible detail and background information"
-- Home Cinema Choice

"possibly the best critical views and reviews I have read of any movies, whatever the type"
--Games Gazette

"…represents a maturing trend in Western writing about anime, giving the medium respect through giving it perspective and identity from the inside rather merely than pasting it with labels it from the outside."
-- Carl Gustav Horn, Pulp magazine

"deserves your deviant attention"
-- Mayfair

Buy online from Amazon US.
Buy online from Amazon UK.

The Erotic Anime Movie Guide was the first book I published under my own name. Helen McCarthy was already in negotiations with Titan Books to write a book about Japanese animated erotica, and she drafted me in to write several chapters on particular areas. The text below is from the Korean edition, translated by the Research Collective for Cultural Studies and published in 2004.

Preface to Korean Edition

As we argued in our original introduction, "sex sells." The Erotic Anime Movie Guide is the first English book on Japanese animation to be published in an Asian language, so it would seem that sex still sells, even when filtered through a translation.

We would like to stress that this book was originally written for a specific audience, in the United Kingdom. We wanted to prove to the British public that there was more to anime than the sex and violence portrayed in the mainstream press, but also to seriously examine erotica in anime. Since the book's original publication in 1998, there have been many changes to anime's standing in the English-language. The success of Pokémon has ensured that many now regard Japanese animation as a children's medium rather than pornography, while the films of Hayao Miyazaki have reached a larger, and more appreciative audience.

If we were to write this book again today, we would have done things a little differently. We would not have included the listings at the back, since they are now superceded by our Anime Encyclopedia, and probably devoted more space to the early history of erotica. However, as historical evidence of the way anime looked in the English-speaking world in the 1990s, we still believe this book to be valuable. We hope you enjoy our approach to this sub-genre of anime, and that this book is of value to the Korean audience, even though it was originally intended for a very different readership.

The Authors