Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki names the essential ’50 books to read to your children’
“I would like to make a film to tell children, ‘It’s good to be alive’.”― Hayao Miyazaki
Japanese animator, filmmaker, screenwriter, author and manga artist, Hayao Miyazaki is universally acclaimed for his animated feature films.
Miyazaki, famously the founder of Studio Ghibli, one of the most popular film and animation studios, directed brilliant films with Ghibli like Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbour Totoro (1988) and Spirited Away (2001), the latter of which became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
As a child, Miyazaki spent most of his time exercising his vivid imagination, either sketching or reading. It is clear that childhood is an important topic for Miyazaki as most of his films explore the concept of childhood in a beautiful way. “I do believe in the power of story,” Miyazaki explained.
Adding: “I believe that stories have an important role to play in the formation of human beings, that they can stimulate, amaze and inspire their listeners.”
Miyazaki was extremely fond of Children’s Literature. He curated a list of 50 essential children’s books for an exhibition celebrating Iwanami Shoten’s “Boy’s Books” series.
See the entire list, below.
Hayao Miyazaki’s 50 favourite children books:
- Les Princes du Vent by Michel-Aime Baudouy
- Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Nine Fairy Tales: And One More Thrown in For Good Measure by Karel Čapek
- Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en
- The Otterbury Incident by Cecil Day-Lewis
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates by Mary Mapes Dodge
- The Radium Woman by Eleanor Doorly
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
- Tistou of the Green Thumbs by Maurice Druon
- The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
- Souvenirs entomologiques by Jean Henri Fabre
- The Little Bookroom by Eleanor Farjeon
- The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- A Norwegian Farm by Marie Hamsun
- City Neighbor, The Story of Jane Addams by Clara Ingram Judson
- The Flying Classroom by Erich Kästner
- From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg
- Nihon Ryōiki by Kyokai
- A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Ship that Flew by Hilda Winifred Lewis
- Children of Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren
- The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting
- The Forest is Alive & Twelve Months by Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak
- Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
- The Restaurant of Many Orders by Kenji Miyazawa
- The Borrowers by Mary Norton
- What the Neighbours Did, and Other Stories by Ann Philippa Pearce
- The Flambards Series by K. M. Peyton
- There Were Five of Us by Karel Poláček
- Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
- When Marnie Was There by Joan G. Robinson
- The Adventures of the Little Onion by Gianni Rodari
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- The Treasure of the Nibelungs by Gustav Schalk
- The Man Who Has Planted Welsh Onions by Kim So-un (out of print)
- Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling
- Heidi by Johanna Spyri
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Eagle of The Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff
- The Rose and the Ring by William Makepeace Thackeray
- The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
- Ivan the Fool by Leo Tolstoy
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
- The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder
- The Little Humpbacked Horse by Pyotr Pavlovich Yershov
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(Via: Radical Reads)
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