It may be a bit of an obvious choice, but the 2019 version of Dororo is a perfect companion piece for To Your Eternity. It’s a darkly tinged tale of a wandering swordsman who’s covered head to toe in prosthetics, since most of his body parts were stolen from him as a baby by 12 otherworldly demons. He travels feudal Japan with a young thief named Dororo, regaining his humanity bit by bit as he defeats each demon. Both he and Fushi go through a painfully realistic process of learning language and understanding relationships between people, something that causes them no end of emotional turmoil. But once they fully realize what it means to be human, they begin to value the time they’ve spent with the friends they’ve met along the way.

Former soldier Violet Evergarden has only known combat for her whole life, so when she finally gets discharged, she sets out on a quest to figure out what that mysterious thing known as “love” really is. Through her work as an “Auto Memory Doll”—a sort of scribe who helps people express their emotions in words and delivers the sentiments to the intended recipient—she pieces together a definition of “love” that encompasses just about the full spectrum of human emotion. Fushi’s brotherhood with Gugu follows a similar arc, teaching him that there’s more than just transactionary relationships and friendships to be had in this world.

As a member of the near-immortal Iorph race, Maquia is told not to fall in love with anyone outside of her tribe—after all, love between a normal human and such a long-lived creature as Maquia would surely end in heartbreak. But when their tribe is invaded and she’s separated from everyone she knows, she finds an infant human boy and decides to raise him herself. Their relationship evolves over time as the boy grows up and becomes a man, although they both know that he’ll die long before she does. Fushi faces this issue when he stays with the same people for a long period of time, realizing that he’ll never truly age in the same way that they do. It’s tragic, but beautiful in its own way—just like this anime movie.

Golem is a seemingly emotionless automaton whose many centuries of life so far have entirely consisted of tending to a single forest. All of that changes when an orphan girl of the endangered and overhunted human race imprints upon him and decides that he’s her father. Over the course of their journey across the treacherous fantasy landscape to find her real parents, Golem begins to understand what it’s truly like to be a father. It reminds us the most of Fushi’s relationship with March, whose motherly influence helped him realize that other people actually care about him. This is the most feel-good anime on this list (although it does have a few tense scenes), so check it out if you’re looking for good vibes.

Fellow Spring 2021 anime Vivy -Fluorite Eye’s Song- is another story about an immortal being who’s dragged into a grand experiment that they didn’t sign up for. Vivy herself was originally just an idol AI whose only directive was to “make people happy by singing”, but she got wrapped up in a time-traveling mission to prevent a future war between humans and AIs, which is far more than she’s ready to handle. It reminds us of Fushi’s tense interactions with the Beholder, who forces him to confront the Nokkers that routinely ravage the land and steal his powers. It’s not fair to anyone, but such is the burden of these two souls...

Both the original series and reboot (although we prefer the original) of Kino’s Journey follow a traveler named Kino and their talking motorcycle Hermes on their never-ending trek to find new and interesting places across the world. Each country they visit has its own set of values (vigilante justice, majority rule, scapegoating another tribe for everything, etc.) and Kino only acts as a non-judgmental observer to these morally questionable societies. Their point of view is that “the world is not beautiful, therefore it is,” much like Fushi learns that there are good and bad people from all walks of life. Despite the ugliness that exists in every society, both Kino and Fushi deem the world as a whole to be worth living in.