While Disneyland may be the happiest place on Earth, even the brightest movies to come from Disney and Pixar have their fair share of sad and intensely melancholic moments. Here are the saddest Disney movies that are sure to have parents tearing up as much as their kids.
13 Saddest Disney Movies I’m Sure Will Make You Cry
13. Lightyear
One of the more offbeat movies produced by Pixar Animation Studios was 2022’s Lightyear, a spinoff from its enormously successful Toy Story franchise. Telling the in-universe story of the science fiction action figure from the movies, Lightyear has Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear stranded on a faraway planet while on a remote mission with his friends in Star Command. Blaming himself for the accident that stranded him and his companions, Buzz volunteers to undergo a series of time flights to find a way for everyone to return home.
Buzz and his friends quickly learn that, because of the time dilation involved, each trip he takes elapses over several years on the planet while only feeling like minutes for him. Rather than accept his mistakes and grow old with his friends, however, an obsessively determined Buzz continues to take these trips, missing the prime of his friends’ lives as they gradually pass away from old age. The rest of Lightyear never quite reaches the emotional highs of its opening sequence, but those scenes absolutely show the movie firing on all cylinders.
12. Frozen II
The concept of parental loss and grief was something that the 2013 instant classic Frozen introduced, but its 2019 sequel, Frozen II, really explores that theme to a greater degree. Set three years after the events of the preceding film, sisters Anna and Elsa set out to learn the origins of Elsa’s magical powers, which leads to them discovering what happened to their parents. Through this, along with the rest of the sisters’ epic quest, Elsa learns to embrace the true nature of her powers to save the day and undo a grave transgression committed by her grandfather.
There are a lot of sad and emotional scenes throughout Frozen II that really stand out in this generally under-appreciated sequel. Learning Elsa has been communicating with the echo of her late mother is a major cathartic moment, while the presumed end of Olaf is as big a cinematic gut-punch as they come. A much more introspective movie than its predecessor, Frozen II doubles down on the sentimentality and really shines when it focuses on the unresolved pain shared by its leads.
11. Toy Story 3
The Toy Story film series is the franchise that put Pixar on the map, with its impressive CG animation and all-age friendly story of sentient toys who live to make their human playmates happy. Over the course of the original trilogy, audiences got to see Andy grow up with his toys, culminating in 2010’s Toy Story 3, which ends with the teenage Andy leaving home for college. As Andy loads up his moving van, he comes to the bittersweet realization that he has outgrown his toys and decides to leave them in the care of his young next-door neighbor Bonny.
On a thematic level, Toy Story 3 is about facing and accepting one’s own mortality, something that figures prominently in the movie’s climax set inside a fiery incinerator. To follow up on that scene, Andy finally learns to let go of his childhood toys, and, by extension, the toys learn to let go of him for their new future and owner. After getting to see how much Andy loved his toys for decades, this farewell is just as emotionally fraught for the audience as it is for the characters.
10. Saving Mr. Banks
The making of the Academy Award-winning 1964 Disney classic Mary Poppins is depicted in the acclaimed 2013 film Saving Mr. Banks. The movie follows Walt Disney’s efforts to convince author P.L. Travers to allow him to adapt Mary Poppins for the big screen, with Travers present during the pre-production of the planned movie and sharing her misgivings about the adaptation. This is juxtaposed with scenes of Travers’ unhappy childhood in Australia, including the self-destructive downward spiral of Travers’ father, Travers Robert Goff.
Emma Thompson’s nuanced portrayal of Travers is among the best performances of her extensive career, as is Colin Farrell’s performance as Goff. Travers having to reconcile with her painful upbringing is appropriately raw and emotional, while Goff’s gradual deterioration and how it affects his family are some of the saddest in Disney’s live-action movie catalog. A stirring movie for what could’ve been a self-congratulatory piece of filmmaking, Saving Mr. Banks is much better and more affective than it has any right to be.
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9. Inside Out
By 2015, Pixar had already developed a well-deserved reputation as an animation studio that specializes in crafting deep and emotional cinematic features. That made its marquee film of the year, Inside Out, a particularly effective movie, with a premise that fixated entirely on personified emotions themselves. As adolescent Riley contends with relocating to a new city and school, the sentient emotions working inside her mind try to restore the cheerful girl that she once was despite the obvious major changes to her life.
So much of Inside Out is about the value of being honest with one’s own emotions, including and especially sadness, which is one of the five personified emotions active in Riley’s mind. However, the most heartbreaking scene in the movie isn’t centered on one of the emotions but rather the heroic sacrifice of Bing Bong, Riley’s forgotten imaginary friend who wants his old friend to regain her happiness. Heroic sacrifices are fairly abundant in Disney movies, but something about Bing Bong’s innocent end to help his friend just strikes a deep chord.
8. Toy Story 2
While Andy’s farewell to his toys in Toy Story 3 is definitely one of the most bittersweet scenes in Pixar history, the Toy Story series actually topped the sadness level for the franchise with its preceding installment, Toy Story 2. The 1999 film sees Woody kidnapped by a greedy toy collector, where he meets other toys from his vintage set, including the cowgirl Jessie. In the series’ most heartbreaking sequence, Jessie recalls through an extended flashback how she was unceremoniously abandoned by her previous owner, Emily, years ago.
Set to the Sarah McLachlan song “When She Loved Me,” the sequence shows the happy days of Emily playing with Jessie before beginning to steadily neglect her as she grows older. This culminates in Jessie getting dumped outside in a cardboard box in the rain, discarded carelessly like common trash. After watching this scene, viewers will be left thinking of their own childhood toys and if they similarly treated them with such wanton reckless abandon.
7. Coco
When dealing directly with the concept of death, as Pixar’s 2017 movie Coco does, one can expect things to get a bit teary with the premise of reuniting with the dearly departed. Centered around the Mexican Day of the Dead, a young boy named Miguel finds himself transported to the Land of the Dead where he meets the spirit of his late great-great grandfather and uncovers secrets about his family history. This is all framed around Miguel embracing his love of music, something his family shunned for generations after a traumatic incident in their past.
Where Coco really excels on an emotional level are the scenes centered around Miguel and his great-grandmother whose age is beginning to catch up with her. Through his adventures in the Land of the Dead, Miguel is able to connect with his great-grandmother on a deeper level and bring her peace before her own passing, healing a generational trauma their family endured. It is a tearjerker of a finale, but one that also comes from a place of knowing Miguel and his family got a happy ending that long eluded them.
6. Dumbo
To be fair, a lot of elements in 1941’s Dumbo haven’t aged very well, as the animated film is very much a product of its time. One major element from the movie that remains just as effective in the 21st century as it did in the 1940s is the emotional turmoil surrounding Dumbo’s plight, particularly his abrupt separation from his mother. With the young elephant Dumbo teased for his abnormally large ears, his mother quickly leaps to his defense, resulting in her being deemed dangerous and caged away from her son.
This tragedy is the driving force behind much of Dumbo, with the elephant trying to reunite and free his mother from her cruel captivity while enduring his own grueling experience as a circus act. The saddest scene in the movie has Dumbo’s mother, after being locked away, still managing to cradle her son in her trunk as a lullaby soothes the elephant to sleep. Even forcibly separated, the mother and son still manage to find ways to comfort each other in one of Disney’s earliest tear-jerking scenes.
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5. Pete’s Dragon
The 2016 remake of Pete’s Dragon improves upon the original 1977 movie, leaning more into the childhood fantasy aspect of the story and ‘80s throwback aesthetic rather than making itself a musical. The movie has young orphan Pete rescued by a mythical dragon named Elliot, with the two hunted by the locals after they accidentally attract unwanted attention. As Pete begins to make human friends, Elliot realizes his presence around Pete will always place his friend in danger, before deciding to leave.
The 2016 Pete’s Dragon is much more grounded and polished than the ‘70s cult classic, and giving it the E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial approach really elevates the material. And, just as with E.T., Pete’s Dragon is about growing up and being able to let go of one’s childhood, in this case represented by Elliot. It’s a bittersweet coming-of-age moment for Pete, to let go of his mythical childhood friend, and one handled with more effective melancholy than the 1977 original movie.
4. Up
The most emotionally devastating sequence that Pixar ever devised was the prologue for its 2009 film Up. Within its opening ten minutes, Up chronicles the start of the lifelong companionship between eventual married couple Carl and Ellie. Over the course of this largely silent sequence, Carl and Ellie meet as children, fall in love, marry, struggle to conceive a child together, and grow old, all before Ellie dies, leaving Carl alone in their unassuming home.
Up quickly shifts into a more hopeful movie about Carl relearning how to let people into his life while going on a faraway adventure, but the prologue casts a pallor over the movie. Audiences immediately understand why Carl is a broken and forlorn figure beyond the prologue, having experienced a fraction of what he endured by losing Ellie in those opening minutes. A concentrated dose of the beauty of life and inevitability of death, the prologue to Up almost functions like Pixar’s pathos-driven mission statement.
3. Old Yeller
As far as family-friendly tearjerkers go, there are few movies that are hardly as notorious as the 1957 live-action film Old Yeller. Set in Texas shortly after the American Civil War, Old Yeller follows a young family as they run their small farm during their father’s temporary departure to run cattle. Left to care for his mother and younger sister, teenager Travis Coates befriends the movie’s eponymous dog as they face perils from the untamed wilderness around the farm.
Marketed as “Walt Disney’s most dramatic motion picture,” Old Yeller certainly lives up to that distinction, as Travis learns firsthand about injury and death while defending the homestead. Not only does Old Yeller pay the ultimate price in keeping Travis and the family safe, but it’s Travis who has to put his beloved dog down to prevent any further harm from befalling them. Even knowing what’s coming, that turn packs an emotional punch nearly 70 years after the movie’s release — a testament to Old Yeller’s raw, traumatic quality.
2. The Fox and the Hound
The 1981 animated classic The Fox and the Hound revolves around a very different kind of grief than many of its Disney counterparts, which explore the concept in a more conventional sense. The story focuses on the end of a friendship because of societal pressures, specifically the unlikely friendship between a young fox and a hunting dog, Tod and Copper, in rural America. After befriending each other as young pups before drifting apart, Tod and Copper reunite as adults, now expected to be mortal enemies despite their amicable history.
Even though The Fox and the Hound ends on a more optimistic note, with Tod and Copper working together to save themselves from a bear, it’s still a bittersweet conclusion. Because of their conflicting backgrounds, Copper and Tod have to part ways, likely for the rest of their respective lives as they return to their societally mandated roles. An understanding and a friendly reconciliation ends the story on a lighter note, but wider and deeper division remains for something of a hollow victory.
1. Bambi
As this list has shown on multiple occasions, so many of Disney’s sad cinematic moments revolve around the death of loved ones, especially parents. The movie that really sets this paradigm for the company moving forward, especially regarding its animated films, is 1942’s Bambi. Telling the tale of a young deer and his woodland critter friends before they face the dangers of human predators and a blazing inferno, the midpoint of the movie has Bambi’s mother killed off-screen by a hunter.
The moment marks the clear end of innocence for Bambi who fruitlessly searches for his mother in the snowy forest, calling out her name, until his stern father coldly informs him of her fate. Though thankfully not particularly explicit, the death of Bambi’s mother set the storytelling template for Disney’s coming-of-age tales for decades to follow and breaks much of the carefree mood for the first half of the movie. With Bambi, Disney found its threshold for delivering absolute heartbreak on the silver screen and has adhered relatively closely to this formula ever since.
And those are our picks for the 13 saddest Disney movies. Grab a box of tissues and go check them out for yourself!
Published: Sep 4, 2024 02:37 pm