Abstract
Recently, accounts of the history of comfort women have appeared in two South Korean films, A Never Ending Story and Herstory. Told from the perspectives of survivors, Myeung-Ja in A Never Ending Story and Seo-Woon in Herstory, the fifteen-minute animations reveal the protagonists’ experiences as young sex slaves in Japanese military camps. This subject matter raises serious questions about how children’s films can represent sexual violence such as rape without traumatizing young viewers while remaining truthful to the survivors’ testimonies. Drawing from gender studies, film, and trauma theory, this paper discusses how A Never Ending Story and Herstory represent atrocities many critics consider unrepresentable.
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Notes
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Christiane Sacco, Plaidoyer au roi de Prusse ou la première anamorphose (1980).
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Wojcik-Andrews, I., Yoo, HJ. (2019). Revisiting Comfort Women History and Representing Trauma in South Korean Films Never Ending Story and Herstory. In: Hermansson, C., Zepernick, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Children's Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17620-4_5
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