
This romantic coming of age tale is an enchanting climate change fable with some of the best animation you've ever seen. Soon he builds a found family including the enigmatic Hina, a girl with strange powers. Escaping from his abusive home, Hodaka Morishima ends up on the streets of Tokyo.

And as you might have guessed by our ranking, it's also even more emotionally devastating. The second entry on our list from Makoto Shinkai, Weathering With You may not have replicated the global phenomenon of Your Name, but it's an incredibly worthy successor. Grief, love, loss and friendship all come into play as this twisty time travel mystery unfurls before us. When Satoru suffers a great personal tragedy, his powers kick into overdrive, sending him back to childhood where he must stop a horrific set of crimes that upended his life so many years ago. He wields a unique power that allows him to travel back to precise moments in time, but only in connection to life or death moments. It's hard to make a tearjerker that's also an engaging murder mystery, but Erased does just that. This is another pure vibes anime that's super easy to rewatch and will keep your emotions flowing through your tear ducts as you explore the strange and unexpected relationship between them. But instead they seem to always keep meeting on rainy solitary days. Both head to the stunning Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, hoping to find solace. When a teenager, Takao, skips school in order to work on his true passion – becoming a shoemaker – he bumps into the beautiful 27-year-old Yukari. This sentimental story centers on the ups and downs of an unexpected friendship. Plus, Shinkai is a master of the visual landscape, so this is a truly astonishing feat of animation too. Fantastical in the best way, this is a twisty tale that'll pull at your heartstrings. A romantic anime story about fate, this epic blockbuster tells the story of two teens who begin to mysteriously swap bodies. took the world by storm when it was released in 2016.

One of the most well known sad anime of recent years, Makoto Shinkai's Your Name. Very big "I would die for them" energy here. This is the sort of tragic slice of life that'll keep you crying and make you want to look after its young cast with your life.
Clannad movie series#
Clannad follows him throughout his teenage years into young adulthood as he changes his life by helping a series of young women. After losing his mother at a young age, his upbringing became abusive, making him unhappy with his life and hometown. Tomoya Okazaki is a disillusioned 17 year old. Moving and authentic, this is the sort of show we wished we had when we were teenagers.

Each episode of this slice of life anime series offers ample crying time, especially as you grow to care about the characters and their journey into young adulthood. A group of friends traverse growing up and all the struggles that come with it after one of them has a nervous breakdown. Your Lie in AprilĬoming of age stories that deal with the realities of growing up are far more common in manga and anime storytelling, and Your Lie in April is a great example. An inventive and thoughtful take on the family drama, Mirai is a sentimental fantasy that'll make you weep. After running away and stumbling upon a magical garden, Kun meets both his mother and Mirai at different stages in their life, allowing him to explore the world and his family in a new way. This 2018 time-hopping family drama was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe, and it follows a young boy named Kun who begins to feel displaced by his baby sister, Mirai. Mamoru Hosoda is a beloved anime director and Mirai showcases his immense talent. See our list of the best anime on Netflix for more like this. Not to be outdone, though, the following two just build on the power of The Rice Noodles, offering up thoughtful, emotionally driven, and bittersweet tales to jerk your tears. Clips from the first entry, The Rice Noodles, have been used in many-an-aesthetic TikTok post and will absolutely make you cry. This charmingly animated anthology is all about those exact vibes as the loosely interconnected stories explore the power of nostalgia through the lens of food.

Nostalgia can be the most melancholy of feelings and Flavors of Youth captures that perfectly.
