| Cream Lemon is a series of animated, erotic short movies from Japan. Beginning in 1984, a group of animators got together and founded this series, working under the premise that something erotic can have artistic merit.
Prior to this, all hentai anime had been cheap, shoddy, underground work. Cream Lemon changed that. Fans of modern anime shows such as Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon tend to dismiss Cream Lemon as low-budget crap; nothing is further from the truth. By getting highly skilled animators, professional voice-actors, and classical musicians together, they were able to set a mood for quality stories that happened to include sex. The finished product was as high-quality as any traditional anime that was released at the same time.
The individual episodes don't form an overall story. Each episode stands on its own, and the series runs a wide range of themes, from drama (The Ami Nonomura series - Ami: Be My Baby was the first Cream Lemon episode) to gothic horror (Black Cat Mansion) to science fiction (Pop Chaser) to fantasy (Rall) to parody (Star Trap). In addition, the popular anime movie Project A-Ko was originally written as a Cream Lemon episode, and was intended to be quite hardcore. The writers saw the potential the first anime could have, and rewrote it into a non-hentai comedy. | 
