The Study Of Miyazaki’s Animated Films From The Perspective Of Curriculum For Children’s Development

Since the 1980s, more than one heavyweight animated films led Miyazaki Hayao to the important master position of this field. And he is considered to be the first thinker whose movies transcend movie itself and rise to the height of humanity. He is very concerned about the healthy development of adolescents. Therefore, starting with children, he created a great deal of animated movies containing profound educational meanings, and has developed a set of unique children development courses.This study is divided into four parts:The first part is to investigate Miyazaki’s children education emotions and ambitions, and the excellent animated films for children he has created based on these emotions and ambitions. Miyazaki Hayao positively observes children around, reflecting the current status of education. He concludes that the most urgent at present is to encourage children to be children; to escape the shackles of adults to grow up free; to participate actively in real life; to be unique; and to face the harsh reality hopefully. For these purpose, he has composed a lot of child-protagonist animated films, including Nausicaa, Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Ponyo on the Cliff.The second part is to demonstrate that Miyazaki’s films can be regarded as beneficial courses for children’s development by analyzing the educational meanings of his seven films. These animations have great guiding significance on three children’s growing issues:handling the relationship with the nature, with the society and with themselves. Accordingly, these animations provide them with three kinds of education: firstly, the environmental education, which specifically includes environmental science, environmental ethics and environmental aesthetic education; secondly, social ethics education, which primarily teach children to understand love and to be tolerant, honest and responsible, strong and brave, moreover, to learn to respect females; thirdly, self-education whose main content is to guide children to discover, recognize and explore the self-worth.The third part is the analysis on values of children development curriculum from Hayao Miyazaki’films, through primary and secondary education teaching practice. Specifically, this analysis discusses the applying situation of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films in classroom teaching and its effects, by showing relevant practicing cases. Three cases are introduced in this section, and respectively corresponding to the three types of courses in the second part. The first case is the application of Miyazaki’s movies in high school geography courses, which belongs to environmental education. The second one is the application in ideological and ethical courses, which is a part of ethics education. And the last case is the application in the themed class meetings belonging to the contents of self-education.The last part is a summary of the meanings that Miyazaki’s films have on curriculum theory and for teachers to develop excellent children development programs. Finally, we appeal to theorists working on curriculum reform of teacher education to attach importance to Miyazaki’s animated films studies, and based on this, to develop new curriculum for teaching, so as to implement course plans in curriculum standards of teacher education for children.