Otaku USA Staff
October 8, 2020 One of the advantages that anime can have over western media is in its ability to express heightened emotion, making the audience empathize intensely with the characters. It provides some of the most powerful moments of catharsis in modern media. In a year like 2020, when negative emotions aren’t exactly scarce, you might shy away from intense scenes, but they can also be a good way to release some of your pent up stress. Many Japanese animations center around high school settings with young female characters, so emotional moments often center around them. The best anime boy crying videos to watch deserve their own list. This list collects our favorite moments in which girls cry for your viewing pleasure. (Or maybe your viewing cathartic anguish. We won’t judge.)
Be warned, there are spoilers ahead for every show that we mention.
Number Five: Kayo’s Breakfast
Erased focuses on a man who has the ability to go back in time to prevent bad things from happening. He usually only goes back a few moments, but the major conflict of the show sees him returning to his middle-school years to prevent a very bad series of events. (We won’t spoil exactly what.)
Kayo is a young girl who will eventually be caught up in the dark twists and turns of the story, but even before that, she had a hard life. A negligent upbringing and a lack of any close friends made her emotionally closed off and distant. Over the course of the story, we see her begin to open up to the main character and the world. We’ve chosen a scene in which Kayo is served a real breakfast for the first time. She gets a peek into the main character’s compassionate home life, and suddenly realizes what she’s been missing all this time. You can watch it here:
We’re only at number five, and it was already a really hard choice to make. On most other lists, this scene would make it to a higher spot. It’s beautifully animated, and with the weight of the show’s context behind it, deeply touching. The only thing that holds it back from advancing is its simplicity. It’s perfectly straightforward, not much complication or subtlety. Sometimes, that’s exactly what you need.
We rate it an 8 out of 10.
Number Four: Azula’s Breakdown
Avatar: The Last Airbender may only be able to claim a questionable position on this list, but we think this scene makes it worth including. Throughout most of the show, Azula has been a recurring villain. She’s cruel, exacting, and obsessed with perfection. She’s never out of control, and she never loses completely, until the very end. When she does, her carefully maintained sense of control completely shatters, and she breaths blue flames in a fit of tearful rage. It’s not heartwarming like Kayo’s breakfast, and it’s not a tear jerker like our next two entries. Instead, the audience gets the satisfaction of watching a villain get her comeuppance, but it’s tinged with a bit of sympathy. It produces a truly unique emotional effect. You can watch it here:
This scene’s interesting tone is a double edged sword. It creates an interesting mix of emotions in the viewer, but they’re also somewhat at odds. This prevents it from having the power as some of the other scenes on this list.
All in all, we rate it an 8.3 out of 10.
Number Three: Nico Robin Flees Ohara
One Piece is chock full of characters with tragic backstories, but not many compare to Nico Robin. She’s a woman who has lived her entire life on the run, simply because she was born on an island with information that the government wanted to keep secret. When that island was destroyed, she lost her family and home, and had to make her way in the world alone. It isn’t until her crewmates rescue her from an impenetrable fortress that she forgives herself for surviving.
It was tempting to select the scene where Robin finally chooses to live again, but after some thought, we decided to choose an earlier scene instead, in which a young Robin leaves her home island burning behind her. She’s helped by two people defying the orders of the military to save her. One of them sacrifices his life so that she can escape, and the other honors that sacrifice, but warns her that he might hunt her down later in life. It sets up the conflict of Robin’s character arc flawlessly, and watching her try to laugh away her sorrow is absolutely heart wrenching. Watch it here:
This scene has a surprising amount of nuance. By this point in the series, the audience already knows that Nico Robin will end up joining the Straw Hat Pirates and finding the companions that she never dared to hope she would. Up until this point, though, she has been a quiet, enigmatic character. This scene brings her quirks and strange behavior together and explains how she got to be the way she is. More than that, though, it showcases Robin’s strength in the face of tragedy.
We rate it 9 out of 10.
Number Two: Faye Valentine’s Message to Herself
Cowboy Bebop is a legendary show, through and through. It’s got style, it’s got great music, and it’s got a killer story. It’s one of the most emotionally stirring experiences in its medium, but it doesn’t actually feature a whole lot of tears. Many of its emotional scenes will leave the audience sobbing while all the characters walk around with dry eyes. If we were making a list of the top five scenes that are going to make you cry, we would definitely have included the famous egg eating scene.
Instead, we had to look elsewhere in the show. Eventually we settled on a scene in which one of the main characters, Faye Valentine, sees a message that she left for herself a long, long, time ago. There’s two fold irony at play in this scene. First, the message was meant to be opened ten years after it was recorded, but Faye was frozen in suspended animation for 54 years, and the world that she grew up with, the one she sees in the recorded video, is long gone. To add another layer to the scene, Faye suffered amnesia after being awakened from suspended animation. She doesn’t even remember leaving the message to herself. You can watch it here:
The scene’s power comes from Faye’s longing for a world, and a life, that she’s lost nearly all her connections to. We never even see a single tear hit the floor, but the sense of emptiness and loss that pervades the scene would squeeze a few tears out of even a hard-hearted viewer.
We rate the scene a 9 out of 10.
Number One: Kyo’s True Form
For those of us who love emotional shows, Fruits Basket needs no introduction. If we could have included multiple scenes from the same show, we might have picked this one. Having to choose only one, though, we settled on one of the emotional high-points of the series.
Kyo, a human born with a cursed zodiac spirit, is ashamed to show his monstrous true form to anyone. He tries especially hard to hide it from Tohru, whom he is coming to love. Of course, the secret eventually gets out, and the question on everyone’s mind is whether Tohru will be able to accept him, even as a monster.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a video clip of this scene online, so you’ll just have to watch the show itself. (That or wait a little while. Youtube videos like that tend to come and go pretty quickly.)
It feels right to cap off this list with something heartwarming, and this scene fits the bill. It’s a turning point in Kyo and Tohru’s relationship, and it leads to happier times for both of them. The scene from the original show is excellent, but we think the version in the 2019 remake is even better.
We rate it 10 out of 10, of course.
Conclusion
It’s inevitable that we missed some excellent scenes. After all, five places isn’t many to house the great emotional scenes of animation history. We’re sorry if we missed your favorite. If you enjoyed watching any of the scenes we linked above, but haven’t seen the show yet, do yourself a favor and find it on Netflix, Crunchyroll, or wherever you get your shows.
