Tear Jerker / Return to Oz

• The situation at the beginning of the movie is depressing. The family lost the old house in the tornado, Uncle Henry broke his leg and can't help out as much on the farm, and Dorothy can't sleep because of her memories of Oz, which no one else believes.
• The whole movie has a melancholy feel to it even with the happy ending.
• The close-up of Dorothy's eye as she lays in the twigs and mud saying goodbye to everyone.
• And just when this couldn’t get worse, just to twist the knife deeper, the scene with Toto running after Dorothy and barking desperately as he watches his best friend get wheeled away, and the way he just lays down with his little head between his paws and whimpers a bit once she’s too far away and says goodbye to him as well. It’s bad enough all of this is happening to a little girl, but to show TOTO’S reaction??? You can’t help but cry!
• Dorothy telling Billina and Jack to be careful as they enter the ornament room.
  Billina: We're a long way from Kansas, Dorothy...
• The credits music.
• Dorothy weeping over the loss of the Scarecrow. The poor kid's been scared and confused the entire film, finally comes across somebody she knows, and he's suddenly taken away from her. Even the Nome King feels sorry for her.
  Now, now, don't cry. Poor, poor Dorothy Gale from Kansas...
  • Though in the Novelization, we're told that he doesn't really feel sorry for Dorothy, he just knows she hurts and wants to make it worse with false sympathy.
    • However, at a close-up of his face during the scene when he comforts her, he actually sheds a tear — of stone, granted — indicating that for a moment, he felt genuine sympathy for her, even if he largely considers her ultimately a pawn for his machinations to be human, which adds some additional depth to the offer to return her home.
• Jack Pumpkinhead's entire situation. He's little more than a young and innocent child, who misses his mother dearly and got his limbs torn off. Then he finds someone he can pretend is his mom even for just a few minutes but then immediately gets swept up in events beyond his control that almost kill him.
  • Just the simple, sincere way he asks, "Dorothy? May I call you 'Mom'? Even if it isn't so?" He knows Dorothy's not his mother, but he loves her anyway and still wants to call her his mother despite only having just met her. It's sweet but also pretty damn sad.
• The Oz people ask Dorothy to stay and be their queen. She says that as much as she loves them, she has to go back, and they understand completely.
• Dorothy has to say goodbye to everyone again. The kicker is the last person she says goodbye to is the Scarecrow. At this point, she starts to lose her composure and grabs his hand, choking out "I love you so much!"
• Even though Dorothy can see Ozma and her friends in the mirror, she still has to hide it from her aunt and uncle.
• The novelization includes a scene of Dorothy remembering Toto, who hadn't crossed her mind during the adventure. She's then described as having her eyes "brim over with tears of guilt and grief, as she thought of him, pining for her, in lonely, distant Kansas." Ouch.
• The simple visual of the yellow brick road being torn to pieces. Such an icon of the original movie, to the point that 'follow the yellow brick road' has just become a common phrase, suddenly uprooted and broken apart and left as nothing more than a heap of dusty old pale-yellow bricks. Just compare the colour of the bricks alone to those in the original film. They look completely different, almost bleached of their vibrancy, as if the very happiness they carried has been sucked away forever.

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