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 Garden—figure 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

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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.