• Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
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• v.13 no.7
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• pp.193-203
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• 2019

Family films with insight of the society are now recognized as significant texts to communicate with audience from the beginning of the history of film and to reflect various viewpoints on changes of the times and socio-cultural context. In such aspect, the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda are very significant in that they suggest very sharp view on modern society through family narrative. His family narratives not only presented a profound reflection on the modern society and human relations through themes on death, loss, severance, and alienation, but also formed a public sympathy based on success in the box-office numbers despite his heavy subjects. His such achievement is closely related to the format of spatial representation to record 'time' and 'daily life' as well as the family film as a narrative form to draw the meaning of a family. Therefore, this study analyzes the family narrative and the format of spatial representation in the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda, and could find the film form where life and space closely communicate each other to reach the topic. This study, concentrating on the spatial representation and the roles and meanings of formal factors in family narrative, can find its own value in its expansion out of the previous studies which adopted macro perspectives on the trend of the times.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.27
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• pp.199-219
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• 2012

An innovative narrative film-making always came out of conflict and negotiation between reality and film form. A lesson we learn from their film-making is a certain reality is no more possible to be dealt with by conventional narrative. A dialectic between a real life and a representation drives a certain film-makers to make films. Kore-eda Hirokazu is internationally known as developing his own method of meshing of so-called real life and the artifice of film. As He began his career as a documentary film-maker, made several documentaries for TV and then turned to his feature film-making, documentary film-making defines the basic stance in all of his film-making. He in particular emphasized that he considered the fundamental ethical standpoint of documentary to be filming from the standpoint that one does not - or cannot - know the person one is filming. And therefore even in his fiction films he avoids subjective cinematic structures that offer easy access to the internal states of his characters. He makes his audience observe the internal states of his characters from the outside with his narrative strategy. This article will analyse two documentary films of Koreeda Hirokazu in such a way that his documentaries meshes a real life and the artifice of film and then explores such a fiction film like that changes its documentary methods into narrative strategy for the same effect on the audience.