Don’t get this one confused with empathy, sympathy is merely a feeling of connection with another, usually through a vested interest in their situation. We might feel sorry for someone with sympathy alone, but true empathy allows us to feel the very same joy, pain, and anguish. Despite one not always being dependent on the other, sympathy often claims the spot as a basic building block of any good sad anime. Besides, how can you cry for someone you don’t care about?

Yoshifumi Nitta, a yakuza member whose career is on the climb, literally crashes into a young girl encased in a futuristic capsule while enjoying a glass of wine in his expensive flat. Her name is Hina and she’s a psychokinetic with enough power to pacify a gaggle of rival thugs with comedic ease. And what does she use this great power for? Mundane yet useful tricks like helping out with construction gigs when she’s not accidentally destroying one of Nitta’s prized possessions. Hina would rather eat, play games or vegetate than do much else.

The anime is geared more towards comedy than anything, but it has several surprisingly wholesome and sad moments. Despite its genre, the characters, particularly Hina and her younger friends, are easy to get behind due to their charming personality traits in addition to that initial capital we’re admittedly prone to giving out to any cute or vulnerable characters.

Anzu, one of Hina’s fellow espers, will be the one who most likely gets you to start leaking salt water. Her character arcs center around personal development, homelessness, and community at an age where these are the last things that should be on her mind. Sure, she’s a bit brash and outspoken, but she’s also a kid trapped in a situation without real parental figures from the start, seeing her cry is almost unbearable.

Integral to drawing on our wellspring of tears is a credible source of anguish. Some of the most painful, touching examples come from the loss of dear family members and friends, an event that’s an inevitable factor of life yet still catches many by surprise. Note, however, that harm does not mean tragedy; one or a series of minor failures that aren’t life-threatening can still leave people hurt on the inside if the matter bears enough personal significance. At a sad anime’s core, though, there will almost always be some form of hurt involved. If you find yourself asking why a certain character’s life has to suck, the creators did a good job.

In the five Elemental Nations, ninjas clash for hegemony. Using the supernatural powers afforded by chakra, they rend apart the earth by day and commit terrible atrocities by night. Born in the midst of such a world, Naruto fights against an ill-fated childhood as an orphan. He harbors dreams of taking on the title of Hokage, the Leaf Village’s leader, so that no one will be able to deny him the recognition he sorely lacks.

Naruto, much like Hinamatsuri, is better known for its dealings in other emotions. Overall, the story maintains an upbeat, hopeful tone with a dash of action and awe true to the shounen genre. When it has its moments though, they hit hard. Sprinkled around pitched battles and aggressive befriending, you’ll find backstories and events that hold deeply dismal optics. We’ll forego spoiling the titular blonde-haired wonder’s story for the sake of the few anime fans that haven’t watched the title yet. We can say that Naruto was looked down upon for the circumstances of his birth before he could even walk, leaving him to develop extraverted attention-seeking behaviors that belie a desperate need for affection and companionship. Worse yet, Naruto isn’t the only one cast into this situation as a result of the ninja system, and when he sees another dealing with the same sort of pain, he’s quick to offer a shoulder to cry on.

The effectiveness of Naruto’s emotional scenes stems from the anime’s ability to bring in a large cast of characters that face loneliness, loss, and frustration on a regular basis. For all the world’s diverseness, many of its people are united by broken hearts.

Whether you laugh or break into a fit of sobbing when a character breaks their bones is largely an effect of portrayal. Making a sad anime isn’t simply a matter of bad things happening to characters we care about. The way that events are treated in-universe decides whether we pick up on the severity of a situation or even connect with a scene at all. Art direction has a great deal to do with this aspect; setting effects, music, shot placement. Unlike books or our own personal experiences, there’s no direct link to emotions of sorrow, so care must be taken in order to align story and scene elements in such a way that they provide us a window to a grieving character’s soul. If done correctly, we may even feel like their burdens are our own.

After his mother dies, Kousei Arima falls into a depressive streak that saps away his will to continue the development of his talent with the piano. All his friends can do is keep the young boy alive and relatively sound until he meets one Kaori Miyazono. She has good looks and a cheerful personality, but most importantly, the way she plays the violin heals Kousei’s wounded heart, allowing him to rediscover his lost love for music.

Being an anime with expression through music as one of its central themes, it comes as no surprise that the musical score blends in beautifully with its scene delivery. Most of the moments from dialogue to internal bouts of narrative are handled in such a way that the setting fully supports the current mood. Revealing any specifics beyond the initial description would ruin a good portion of the effect, it’s enough to say that A-1 Pictures clearly put thought into making sure that the space between us and the protagonists’ feelings would be as small as possible.

Even four years after its debut, Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso maintains its position within the top 100 most popular titles according to MyAnimeList.