Hayao Miyazaki Picks His 50 Favorite Children’s Books

Once upon a time, books served as the de facto refuge of the “physically weak” child. For animation legend, Hayao Miyazaki, above, they offered an escape from the grimmer realities of post-World War II Japan.

Many of the 50 favorites he selected for a 2010 exhibition honoring publisher Iwanami Shoten‘s “Boy’s Books” series are time-tested Western classics.

Loners and orphans–The Little Prince, The Secret Gardenfigure prominently, as do talking animals (The Wind in the Willows, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle).

And while it may be a commonly-held publishing belief that boys won’t read stories about girls, the young Miyazaki seemed to have no such bias, ranking Heidi and Laura Ingalls Wilder right alongside Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island’s pirates.

Several of the titles that made the cut were ones he could only have encountered as a grown up, including 1967’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and When Marnie Was There, the latter eventually serving as source material for a Studio Ghibli movie, as did Miyazaki’s top pick, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers.

We invite you to take a nostalgic stroll through Miyazaki’s best-loved children’s books. Readers, how many have you read?

Hayao Miyazaki’s Top 50 Children’s Books

  1. The Borrowers — Mary Norton
  2. The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  3. Children of Noisy Village — Astrid Lindgren
  4. When Marnie Was There — Joan G. Robinson
  5. Swallows and Amazons — Arthur Ransome
  6. The Flying Classroom — Erich Kästner
  7. There Were Five of Us — Karel Poláček
  8. What the Neighbours Did, and Other Stories — Ann Philippa Pearce
  9. Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates — Mary Mapes Dodge
  10. The Secret Garden — Frances Hodgson Burnett
  11. Eagle of The Ninth — Rosemary Sutcliff
  12. The Treasure of the Nibelungs — Gustav Schalk
  13. The Three Musketeers — Alexandre Dumas, père
  14. A Wizard of Earthsea — Ursula K. Le Guin
  15. Les Princes du Vent — Michel-Aime Baudouy
  16. The Flambards Series — K. M. Peyton
  17. Souvenirs entomologiques — Jean Henri Fabre
  18. The Long Winter — Laura Ingalls Wilder
  19. A Norwegian Farm — Marie Hamsun
  20. Heidi — Johanna Spyri
  21. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — Mark Twain
  22. Little Lord Fauntleroy — Frances Hodgson Burnett
  23. Tistou of the Green Thumbs — Maurice Druon
  24. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle
  25. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler — E. L. Konigsburg
  26. The Otterbury Incident — Cecil Day-Lewis
  27. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll
  28. The Little Bookroom — Eleanor Farjeon
  29. The Forest is Alive or Twelve Months — Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak
  30. The Restaurant of Many Orders — Kenji Miyazawa
  31. Winnie-the-Pooh — A. A. Milne
  32. Nihon Ryōiki — Kyokai
  33. Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio — Pu Songling
  34. Nine Fairy Tales: And One More Thrown in For Good Measure — Karel Čapek
  35. The Man Who Has Planted Welsh Onions — Kim So-un
  36. Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe
  37. The Hobbit — J. R. R. Tolkien
  38. Journey to the West — Wu Cheng’en
  39. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — Jules Verne
  40. The Adventures of the Little Onion — Gianni Rodari
  41. Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson
  42. The Ship that Flew — Hilda Winifred Lewis
  43. The Wind in the Willows — Kenneth Grahame
  44. The Little Humpbacked Horse — Pyotr Pavlovich Yershov (Ershoff)
  45. The Little White Horse — Elizabeth Goudge
  46. The Rose and the Ring — William Makepeace Thackeray
  47. The Radium Woman — Eleanor Doorly
  48. City Neighbor, The Story of Jane Addams — Clara Ingram Judson
  49. Ivan the Fool — Leo Tolstoy
  50. The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle — Hugh Lofting

Related Content:

The Essence of Hayao Miyazaki Films: A Short Documentary About the Humanity at the Heart of His Animation

Hayao Miyazaki Tells Video Game Makers What He Thinks of Their Characters Made with Artificial Intelligence: “I’m Utterly Disgusted. This Is an Insult to Life Itself”

Build Your Own Miniature Sets from Hayao Miyazaki’s Beloved Films: My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service & More

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  She’ll be appearing onstage in New York City this June as one of the clowns in Paul David Young’s Faust 3. Follow her @AyunHalliday.


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Comments (12)
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  • Esa Laaksonen says:

    One Astrid Lindgren… Good. Ever heard of Tove Jansson? … Or Salman Rushdie?

  • Catherine Roth says:

    Wow, what a lovely list! The Ship That Flew was one of my favorites (junior high days, I think) and I was thrilled to find a copy at our main library’s deaccessioned bookstore. I think I need to get a few of these and read them as an adult. Any recommendation from the amazing Mr. Miyazaki is worth checking out.

  • Bernd says:

    No Michael Ende?! What a shame. Does he know him? Amazing the kind of movies he could do from his material …

  • Buck says:

    No Ronald Dahl???

  • Tremolo says:

    The Adventures of the Little Onion! Yaaaay!
    Btw, how come all issues on Amazon are in Chinese? (Except one in Russian.) The link provided in this list says the name of the author is “Gipollino Rodari”! (The original title is Cipollino.) So weird.
    Anyway, it’s a fantastic book and we need some reissues, pls :)

  • Cookie says:

    Considering Miyazaki tried really hard to get the rights to Pippi Longstocking, and Ghibli did the Ronja the Robber’s Daughter TV-series, I’m going to go ahead and say the Children of Noisy Village is just a representative of Lindgren…

    …and maybe he doesn’t consider Tove Jansson a children’s author – Moomin are, after all, hugely popular in Japan, and clearly inspired Studio Ghibli.

  • Brett says:

    That Roald Dahl’s brother?

  • Didem Güney says:

    The little prince

  • Nick says:

    It’s “Roald” Dahl…and it’s his personal favs remember. Not yours !

  • Bernice Ramsdi-Firth says:

    My absolute favourite as a child was ‘The Secret of the Sun God’s Cave’. Gave me a life-long love of stories about early man, (and woman). Also ‘French Fairy Tales’ was a beautiful book with wonderful fairy stories, and ‘Children of the Sea’ told of the connection between a child who saved a dolphin and how they connected. Would love to have these books today for my own grandchildren.

  • Bernice Ramsdin-Firth says:

    Bernice Ramsdin-Firth says:
    February 6, 2019 at 1:42 pm
    My absolute favourite as a child was ‘The Secret of the Sun God’s Cave’. Gave me a life-long love of stories about early man, (and woman). Also ‘French Fairy Tales’ was a beautiful book with wonderful fairy stories, and ‘Children of the Sea’ told of the connection between a child who saved a dolphin and how they connected. Would love to have these books today for my own grandchildren.

  • Joaquin Mejia says:

    I have read “The Hobbit” and “When Marnie was There”. I love Miyazaki’s movies. I also love children’s books. They are so much more uplifting than the books for older audiences.

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