As a boy I liked reading about boys going on adventures, but I also liked pirates, aliens, superheroes, knights, robots, etc. I think I liked all those more than I liked boys going on adventures. The ideal was a combination of the two, like Treasure Island. A girl going on an adventure was also more interesting if the girl was a princess, and in fact I liked Disney movies.
I don’t think I would have liked Ghibli movies when I was a kid. Nausicaa and Mononoke would have been too scary and the others would have been boring. (But I confess that as an adult I only like those two scary ones and I think the others are boring, which is an opinion other people tend not to share.)