"childhood"

1988 · Hayao Miyazaki · 86 min · Fantasy

My Neighbor Totoro is one of those rare films that does something almost no other movie attempts, let alone pulls off. It tells a story about nothing dramatic and makes it feel like everything. Miyazaki's confidence in quiet moments, his trust that children's joy is compelling enough to carry a film, results in something that feels less like watching a movie and more like remembering what it was like to be small. It won't satisfy everyone, and it doesn't try to. That's part of why it works.

2013 · Neil Gaiman · 181 pages · Fantasy

Neil Gaiman's 2013 novella about a man revisiting the memories of a childhood encounter with something ancient and terrifying is his most personal and emotionally direct work. The Hempstock women are among his best creations, the childhood perspective is handled with unsettling accuracy, and Gaiman captures the way memory distorts and preserves in equal measure. At 181 pages, some readers wish it lingered longer in its world, and the mythological framework is left deliberately vague. But as a story about the things we forget because remembering them would be unbearable, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is Gaiman at his most affecting.