Sometimes… Sometimes you just want to be hurt. It’s a seemingly weird response, but one that a lot of people have. Maybe you have a lot going on and need to see that it can be worse. Maybe you just want to have a nice cathartic cry. Regardless, you need to be sad and you need a sad anime to tip you over the edge. We have those sad anime recommendations for you. Enjoy your cry.
Best Sad Anime
Your Lie in April
Although once a child prodigy in the music world, pianist Kousei Arima is left in a downward spiral after his mother’s death, unable to even hear the sound of his own piano. Even after two years, Arima has all but left the music world behind, disappointing fans and rivals alike, and living in a colorless world. Then one day that that all changes when he is introduced to the beautiful violinist Kaori Miyazono who brings color into his world once more.
Your Lie in April, notorious tearjerker anime disguised as what appears to be a colorful coming-of-age romance, combines heart-rending romance with classical music that will give you an appreciation of the genre.
Clannad
Tomoya Okazaki is a delinquent who finds everything dull and believes he will never amount to anything. That is, until a girl named Nagisa catches his eye one day on his way to school. Suddenly, Tomoya begins to notice Nagisa more and more around the campus. She is sickly and weak, but she always tries her best in order to follow her dream of reviving the school’s drama club. Claiming he has nothing better to do, he decides to help Nagisa, and along the way ends up helping several other girls and potential drama club members. However, as he learns more about the girls and helps them overcome their problems, he might just be able to overcome his own as well.
Based off a visual novel with many paths, you follow the main character as he solves all the problems of literally every troubled girl he meets. While several stories are heart-breaking in and of themselves, the real pain doesn’t come until the second season where it takes your tear-irritated eyes and invites you to cry them raw.
Japan Sinks 2020
On a day just like any other in Tokyo, a devastating earthquake rocks Japan. Separated by the activities of their daily lives, the Mutoh family struggles to find each other in the chaos. However, as they are brought together, they soon find that the news is so much worse. With Mount Fuji threatening to erupt and Japan gradually sinking, the Mutoh must face their difficult reality.
As a natural disaster anime, you can expect a little raw suffering. However, this one takes one realistic and relatively likable family and sees them devestated as they struggle, and often fail, to survive. Its got that telltale Yuasa art style that can put people off, but it is definitely not a series to sleep on.
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0
Frustrated with her family, middle schooler Mirai Onozawa wishes to tear everything apart. Unfortunately, that wish comes true in an unexpected 8.0 earthquake. Suddenly, she and her younger brother find themselves surrounded by chaos in Odaiba. Single mother and motorcyclist Mari runs into these two scared kids and decides to help them get back home.
Like Japan Sinks 2020, Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 also focuses on a horrific earthquake, since Japan has significant experience with that particular form of suffering. It also tells a family tale, but this time follows only siblings and the empathetic stranger trying to keep them alive.
Bokurano
During their summer vacation, 15 children are enjoying summer camp together. One day, they decide to go explore a cave by the sea, inside they meet a mysterious man named Kokopelli who is surrounded by high-tech equipment. Kokopelli claims to be a game developer and asks if the children would help him test it. Each child signs a contract, but instead of playing a game, they are actually piloting a giant mech to defend the earth from 15 different alien invasions.
When it comes to mecha and sadness, many tend to end up on the side of melodrama to help drive home how terrible war is. Bokurano takes the firm stance of seemingly hating all its characters, if not all of humanity, so it tortures everyone, paints them in terrible lights, and generally captures the innate evil of children in a stressful and traumatic situation.
Angel Beats
Otonashi wakes up without any memories, only to be told that he is dead. What’s more, a rifle-toting girl named Yuri suddenly asks him to join the Afterlife Battlefront to wage war against the Angel that rules this world and the unfair god she serves. Unable to believe Angel is evil, he tries to talk to her, but the meeting does not go as planned. From there, Otonashi gradually discovers more about himself and the mysteries of the afterlife.
Angel Beats has a particular talent for being a series that is incredibly comical in one episode, and absolutely heart-breaking in the next. It is actually quite the impressive feat.
Charlotte
Yuu Otosaka has the ability to slip into other people’s mind and control them for five seconds at a time. He has been using it to get good grades, but after he is caught by the enigmatic Nao Tomori, he is forced to transfer to a special school with his sister. At this supernatural new school he is forced to use his powers to hunt down other students who are abusing their own powers.
In order to understand how Charlotte is sad, you have to stick with it for awhile. It starts off relatively light and comical about a group of kids trying to stop other kids with supernatural powers from using those powers and getting discovered. However, as they go into the reasons why and what they end up doing about it, the levity starts to dissipate.
Anohana
After the death of childhood friend Meiko “Menma” Honma, Jinta Yadomi and his group of friends grew apart, each trying to deal with grief and guilt in their own way. However, when Jinta starts seeing what he believes to be Menma’s ghost, the group of friends are drawn together to help grant her long-desired wish.
Anohana wears the mantle of another legendary anime tearjerker. It deals with a group of friends who had a member of their friend group die suddenly one day in an accident. Of course they bottled up that grief and the series explores all the little holes that bottled-up grief pours out of in each character.
Now and Then, Here and There
Shu is a typical Japanese boy, but when he sees a mysterious girl atop a smokestack, he follows her and is pulled into a strange desert world. It is here that Shu is forced to discover a world filled with the tragedies of war. Genocide, torture, hunger, and thirst are abound, but Shu is determined to try and save the girl that he saw.
This isn’t your normal sort of isekai anime where the main character ends up in another world and has a lovely life. No, in fact he has a terrible life. This is a fine vintage for the connoisseur of human suffering and how awful humans can be to each other.
March Comes In Like a Lion
Rei Kiriyama recently started to live alone in his last year of high school. He is able to financial support himself as a professional Shogi player, but while he officially became a pro in middle school, he is collapsing under the pressure to succeed. Burdened with his own problems, Rei has found solace among a kind family of three sisters, the Kawamotos. The oldest, Akari, likes to take in strays and Rei is the latest. While he feels conflicted about spending time with them, they provide accepting affection that he has gotten nowhere else.
March Comes in Like a Lion is as much about shogi as many sports anime series are about the sports. It is technically about the main character climbing up the professional shogi circuit, but it is also about his severe depression and the other issues that characters around him suffer. Those issues are explored and examined in order to give people a break from the flat track rollercoaster thrill ride that is shogi, at least for people who know nothing of shogi.
Orange
On the first day of a new semester, Naho Takimiya oversleeps. On her way out after being late for school, she finds a letter waiting for her that says it is from herself ten years in the future. The letter ardently states her regrets that she has surrounding a new transfer student, Kakeru Naruse. Thinking it is a prank at first, Naho ignores it, but when the events described within begin to come true, Naho decides that she will try to help her future self.
The overall theme of Orange is regret. We all have regrets, but in many cases they aren’t so serious. In Orange, the regrets of the character group all center around what they did and didn’t do which lead to the death of their friend.
Violet Evergarden
After the Great War and her time in it came to an end, Violet Evergarden is adrift. Her purpose was once only battle, and now she must find a new one. After recovering from the loss of her arms, Violet takes up a job at the CH Postal Services. Here she transcribes people’s thoughts into what should be emotional letters. However, the “emotional” part seems to greatly escape her, but she aims to learn how to move people with words.
As a story about an orphan raised to be a weapon of war trying to learn emotions, it seems only right that you would experience some of those emotions while watching it. As the series explores small arcs, each one sad in its own way, there is likely to be at least one that gets you dripping those fat, sloppy kind of tears. If nothing else, be prepared to tear up over how stunning some visual scenes are, because they are envy-inspiring.
Madoka Magica
Madoka Kaname and Sayaka Miki are your typical middle school girls, but one day they encounter a cute creature named Kyuubey that offers to grant them one wish. In exchange for their wish, they must become magical girls and protect humanity from witches. While Sayaka accepts right away, Madoka is more hesitant, not knowing what she would wish for. However, her decision is even further delayed when the mysterious Homura Akemi, a transfer student, begs her not to accept.
Subversive magical girl series that then launched its own “dark” magical girl sub-genre, Madoka Magica removed much of the camp from its magical girls and replaced it with suffering and philosophy. While any anime can viciously end the lives of its characters, Madoka Magica manages to make you care about them just enough to make it hurt.
Rumbling Hearts
Initially, Takayuki Narumi befriended Mitsuki Hayase because Mitsuki’s friend Haruka Suzumiya had a crush on him. He grew close to Mitsuki, but when Haruka asked him out, he accepted in order to not hurt her feelings. However, as Takayuki and Mitsuki begin to realize their feelings, tragedy strikes that changes everything.
Love triangles. They will never end cleanly. While this particular series leans a little more on the melodramatic, as older sad anime series often do, it does highlight that keen sting of love and loss.
Plastic Memories
Tsukasa Mizugaki has failed his college entrance exams, but he manages to land a job at the Sion Artificial Intelligence Corporation. This corporation is responsible for the creation of Giftias, or highly advanced androids which are almost indiscernible from normal humans. However, unlike humans, Giftias have a maximum lifespan of around nine years and four months. Terminal Service One, the station Tsukasa was assigned to, is responsible for collecting Giftias that have met their expiration date, before they lose their memories and become hostile.
Imagine loving something that has a vastly limited lifespan compared to yourself. Not like how you would love a pet, but how you would love a person. Growing closer each day and never getting to that steady period that comes with a lifetime together. Instead, you are suddenly ripped apart. That’s Plastic Memories for you.
School Live
Yuki Takeya is in love with school life. She loves it so much that she joined the School Living Club with three other girls, their supervising teacher, and the club dog Taroumaru. This club makes the most of living at school. However, Yuki’s blissful school life is all a delusion. The real purpose of the School Living Club is to prevent Yuki’s fragile reality from shattering. In reality, these girls are surviving the zombie apocalypse by barricading themselves within the school.
Just because a series is about a zombie apocalypse doesn’t mean it has to be sad. Just look at High School of the Dead. That series is boobalicious and comical. However, School Live takes a different approach in making you bond with the characters as you would in any slice of life show, then it starts hurting them. It is actually devious, ingenious, and also very effective as far as storytelling goes.
Myself;Yourself
As a child, Hidaka Sana leaves his friends and life behind to move to Tokyo with his parents. Years later, he returns as a high school student. While some friends have remained the same, some people, including Sana himself, are completely different. However, the thing that has changed the most is his dear friend Yatsushiro Nanaka. She used to smile and be so sweet, but now she is withdrawn and overcome by an air of gloom.
Myself;Yourself examines the mercurial nature of relationships. If you just up and move away, when you come back, everyone will likely be different. In this series, the main character comes back damaged, and returns to damaged friends. It is rather exaggerated at times, but sometimes you just want your romantic drama to be… Dramatic.
Made in Abyss
The Abyss is an enormous cave system and the only unexplored place in the world. No one knows how deep it goes, but generations of bold adventurers have descended into it. In the town at the edge of The Abyss, an orphan named Rico dreams of raiding, as her mother did before her. One day while exploring the murky depths, she meets a boy, who turns out to be a robot, kicking off the start of her epic adventure.
Made in Abyss is a series whose art style makes even adults look as though they are children. It is cute, and soft, and most importantly, it is disarming. It makes the horrific suffering it shows you later in the series more impactful.
To Your Eternity
One day, an entity, for reasons unknown, threw an orb to Earth. With no emotion or identity, the orb is meant to gather sensations and is able to take the shape of things it encounters as it learns. For many years, it was a rock, and then it became moss, and when a wolf took its last breath near it, it became the wolf. After wandering for some time, it met a boy. After a long struggle, the boy, too, took his last breath. With human form, now the orb sets off on his never-ending journey where he will meet many new people and have many new experiences.
To Your Eternity can get you right at the first episode, but what you don’t know is that there are no happy endings here. Just endings. Get prepared for every arc to come in and sucker punch you right in the gut. It’s actually been one of the more interesting anime series to watch if you just want to be constantly wounded in your feelings.
Full Moon wo Sagashite
Before she could confess to him, Mitsuki’s crush Eichi moved to America. She continues to follow her dream of becoming a singer in hopes that her music will reach him someday. However, Mitsuki suffers from throat cancer and is putting off a surgery to remove it for fear of losing her voice. One day, two shinigami appear and tell her she only has a year to live, which spurs her into action.
There have been several overly dramatic romantic dramas on this list, but this is perhaps the very pinnacle of them. It is absolutely played up to the maximum with every trope wedged in there to help it reach such great hammy heights. Again, while I sound overly critical, sometimes that sort of thing does hit just right. The only true fault with it is that aging art style.
From the New World
After the sudden outbreak of psychokinesis, the .01% of the population that developed it started using their powers for nefarious means. Far into the future, the town of Kamisu 66 is wholly populated by psychics with the young Saki being one of the most recent to awaken her powers. Finally she can join the rest of her friends at the Sage Academy. However, her school days are plagued with questions that threaten to unravel the dark secrets of her idyllic village.
This is definitely the sort of series that grows sadder the longer you watch it. I always enjoyed that you learn about the world as the children learn of it. You watch them grow up and so, too, does the world grow. It also darkens as you learn the often unhappy answers to the many questions that have been posed.
Akame ga Kill
Tatsumi is a naive boy from a rural village that makes the trip to the city in order to join the military and help his hometown. However, after he is rejected, he ends up joining Night Raid, a group of assassins part of a revolutionary movement to overthrow the government. From there, he must fight a brutal and increasingly bloody shadow war.
Action series often have their sad moments, but they are often interspersed across several hundred episodes. It dilutes the feeling significantly. Akame ga Kill manages to make you care about characters, and then kills nearly all of them in crushing ways. Since it only has 24 episodes, there isn’t much time for those many deaths to be diluted with silly things like happy moments.
WorldEnd
It has been five hundred years since humanity went extinct at the hands of the mysterious beasts that roam the land. Now the surviving races have retreated to floating islands in the sky out of reach of most of the beasts. However, there are ones nimble enough to put these people in danger. A small group of young girls, a race called the Leprechauns, are now raised as the only ones that can wield ancient weapons to fend off invasion by the beasts, but it often requires them to sacrifice themselves and they don’t often live to see adulthood. Enter Willem, the last surviving human woken from his slumber and sent to watch over these girls, still feeling the sting from the final battle where he lost everything five hundred years ago.
World End is all about cute young children that are required to be weapons of war. They are raised just to be disposable and die. The main character gets attached, you get attached, and everyone leaves sad. It is, however, the kind of sad anime that builds over time. You may not be so sad at first, but that last episode will gut you.
86
For years, the Republic of San Magnolia has been at war with the Giadian Empire. They were constantly plagued by their hordes of unmanned drones until the government created an unmanned solution of their own, finally able to wage their war without casualties. However, that is not quite the truth. The “unmanned” combat weapons are actually used by those of the 86th sector of the Republic, but they are not considered even human. This is the tale of both Shin, an 86er and battle commander, and Lena, their sympathetic handler who remotely commands the detachment from inside the city.
This is actually in a pretty similar vein to World End above, but less fantasy and more sci-fi. It features people who, by pure racism, are not even considered people and made to fight in a war for their country. So inconsequential they are that their war is labeled unmanned. Of course, it focuses on breaking your heart by showing how very people-like they really are.
Wolf’s Rain
In a dying world, there is a legend/ When the world ends, the path to paradise will open, but only wolves can find the way. Long thought extinct, wolves live among humans with the the ability to shape-shift into human forms. In Freeze City, several wolves find themselves drawn by a mysterious scent that they believe is the start of their path to paradise.
Melancholic. That’s Wolf’s Rain. The world is dying a slow and steady death, and the people with it. There’s no great apocalyptic event, just everyone existing until they slowly won’t anymore. In that world, you follow wolves who are chasing a sliver of hope, and even at the end there is only one thing waiting for them.
Devilman Crybaby
Akira has always been a little weak and blends into the background, so when his childhood friend asks for help uncovering devils, he agrees. The pair head to Sabbath where many gather for debauchery and to be possessed by devils. When the devils begin to wreck havoc in their new living hosts, Akira agrees to merge bodies with a devil in order to save his friend. Though he now has a voracious devil inside him, he still has the heart of a crybaby.
While initially Cevilman Crybaby seems like gratuitous sex and ultra-violence, over time you begin to bond with the characters and understand even the one’s you hate. It takes a fair bit to ramp up to actually being heart-breaking, but that final act is one of those that you will remember forever.
Terror in Resonance
After a terrorist attack on a Japanese nuclear facility, the country was paralyzed to act. After six months of searching for the perpetrators, the public is shown a video of two boys known as Sphinx that take credit for a recent bomb attack in which they are then linked to the nuclear attack and theft by police. Threatening more mayhem to come, it is up to the police to catch these terrorists. However, as terrorists that never willingly kill anyone, their acts beg the public to pay attention to the horrific crimes committed against them in the past.
It’s not often you see a series try to paint terrorists as sympathetic, but bless Shinichiro Watanabe, he tried. It works, too. You bond with them and you learn about their noble motives, but we all know what must happen to terrorists in the end.
Haibane Renmei
Rakka is an amnesiac who only remembers emerging from her cocoon. She is born into the world as a Haibane, a group of young people who have small gray wings and halos. While she tries to live a normal life, there is much that the Haibane don’t know and must figure out.
Like aforementioned Wolf’s Rain, Haibane Renmei is another series that wallows in the melancholy of it all. It is a series stuffed full of symbolism, and none of it happy. You watch the characters eek out a peaceful and even lightly happy existence only for that to be taken away from them. It won’t likely get you to tears, but you’ll feel the dull ache in your heart.
Bonus: Anime Movies
The bread and butter of anime movies is sadness. As such, there are some good quick emotional gut punches out there. Buuuut, I typically don’t include movies on my recommendation lists unless specifically about anime movies. So here’s a quick list of the most absolutely crushing sad anime movies.
- Colorful
- When Marnie Was There
- Grave of Fireflies
- Into the Forest of Firefly’s Light
- 5 Centimeters Per Second
- I Want to Eat Your Pancreas
- In This Corner of the World
- The Place Promised in Our Early Days
- Barefoot Gen
