Grace Han – Back to Front: Animating Melodrama in Makoto Shinkai’s Garden of Words (winner)

The late twentieth century witnessed multiple reconsiderations of the reiterated filmic melodrama in cinema studies. To some, the filmic melodrama stands as a poignant example of women’s film (Williams p. 2); to others, it represents the neo-Marxist liberation of bourgeois struggle (Gledhill pp. 6-8); and still to others, it exists as a mode of expression, […]