Cream Lemon (くりいむレモン or くりぃむレモン, Kurīmu Remon) is an early hentai series. The first Cream Lemon OVA was released in August 1984, though Cream Lemon was not the first hentai OVA. The first was Lolita Anime, released earlier in February 1984. Patrick W. Galbraith writes that Cream Lemon "was by far the longest running and most influential" hentai series in the 1980s and "laid the foundation for pornographic animation in Japan".
Related to Cream Lemon is the Project A-ko franchise, which was meant to be the third installment of Cream Lemon but changed during production to be a mainstream film. The only remaining indication is the bath scene with B-ko. Adult entertainment company Excalibur Films dubbed, edited, and released in English five Cream Lemon OVAs as parts two and three of their three-volume Brothers Grime X-Rated Cartoons series in 1987 and 1989. In 1987, Brazilian distributor Everest Video licensed the series and released much of it on VHS, in uncensored form.
Cream Lemon is a collection of sometimes surreal stories having different settings and situations, with genres including fantasy, comedy, suspense, sci-fi, action, drama, mecha, magical girl, horror, and mystery. The overriding theme of the series is sex of almost any kind imaginable. Most chapters stand alone as separate titles, having no relation to any other stories within the Cream Lemon series. The main recurring character is Ami Nonomura, who has an incestuous relationship with her step-brother Hiroshi.
Cream Lemon often focuses on unrealistic and exaggerated sexual themes. One example is the story of a teenage girl who does not like having sex because of a series of rapes in her family. To cure this, the school counselor orders her to strip in front of the art class and masturbate herself to the point of orgasm. She then has public sex with a boy and likes it, causing the whole class to start having sex. Many others are similarly surreal.
