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.

2008 · Neil Gaiman · 312 pages · Fantasy

Neil Gaiman reimagines The Jungle Book with a graveyard instead of a jungle and ghosts instead of animals, and the result is one of his finest achievements. Nobody Owens, raised by the dead after his family is murdered, grows up among tombstones and specters in a story that's funny, frightening, and ultimately heartbreaking in the best possible way. Each chapter works as both a standalone adventure and part of a larger arc about the price of growing up. The murder mystery that frames the story is its weakest element, but the emotional core, a boy learning that leaving home is the hardest and most necessary thing you'll ever do, is devastating. A book for every age that somehow gets better with each reading.

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.

1908 · Kenneth Grahame · 258 pages · Children's Literature

The Wind in the Willows is a gentle masterpiece of English pastoral writing, a book about friendship, home, and the beauty of quiet living that has lost none of its charm in over a century.

1942 · David Hand · 70 min · Animation, Drama

Bambi is a visually stunning meditation on life, loss, and the cycles of nature that packs more emotional devastation into 70 minutes than most films manage in twice the time.

1876 · Mark Twain · 274 pages · Literary Fiction

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a warm, funny, occasionally thrilling portrait of childhood that Twain wrote with obvious affection for the world he was remembering. It's not the challenging, morally complex work that Huckleberry Finn would become. It's lighter, more episodic, and more comfortable in its nostalgia. The fence-painting scene, the cave adventure, and Tom's irrepressible scheming have earned their place in the cultural vocabulary. But the novel lacks the depth and the edge that distinguish Twain's best work, and modern readers should be aware that its portrayal of certain characters reflects attitudes that haven't aged well.