Abstract
The world of classic and contemporary children’s literature, picturebooks or anime films, sometimes tell children’s stories that are misunderstood by adults. These narratives tend to return childhood directly to the heart of natural world; these stories claim an ancestral affiliation of the child with Nature. So, why do children, more than adults, feel an almost primordial attraction towards Nature?From Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio to James Matthew Barrie’s Peter Pan, from The Little Mermaid of H. C. Andersen to Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies, from Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke to Ponyo on the cliff by the sea, we find narrated childhoods that feel “at home” (Cantatore, 2015) in Nature, linked to it by a strong and irrevocable sense of belonging. Children, pueri aeterni (Hillmann, 1964), are emblematic figures of passages, threshold crossings, mutations and changes: a “Betwixt‐and‐Between”, constantly subject to metamorphosis. Through their literature, children are indeed the representations of what Calvino call Lightness (Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1988). They are amphibious creatures suspended between multiple kingdoms, in a constant game of being something or something else, someone or someone else, not in a world intended as given and with each creature in the “right place”, but possible transformation and elusiveness.A Reading Key searches in works for children’s – like children’s books or films – , through the interpretative category of narrated pedagogy, for the meaning of literary and artistic descriptions as historical testimonies of the pedagogical function of the relation between Children and Nature.