Even dinosaurs have to endure rocky days...
Example subpages:
Individual examples:
- 9: 5. Especially directly after the scene where 2 gets his soul sucked out by the Fabrication Machine and 5 is reduced to a whimpering mess, pulling his legs against his chest, rocking back and forth, and coming as close to crying as a stitchpunk possibly can. Poor little guy needs a hug, really.
- An American Tail: Fievel gets separated from his family when immigrating to America, and once he reaches said destination he is sold into child labor by a scheming con artist who happens to be a cat, gets lost in New York, is captured by a gang of cats, and eventually falls into a state of despair that he will never see his family again while breaking down in tears at an orphan alley, that is until the very end.
- Beavis And Butthead Do America: Although it's completely Played for Laughs, there is a scene where Beavis gives a long, tragic speech about how he's "never gonna score" after being (falsely) promised sex with an attractive arms dealer. Most young men can relate to him in this scene at one point or another.
- The Book of Life: Manolo. Imagine if you were shoved into something you had no interest in, while everyone in your family AND village spat on your true ambition. And to make it worse, you're tricked into suicide because two gods placed a bet to see whether you or your best friend/love rival would marry the girl of your dreams and the god betting against you is a Sore Loser of the highest order. At least it gets better.
- Coraline:
- Other Wybie is mute but very polite and friendly. The Other Mother sewed his face into a permanent grin when he frowned, and he still helps Coraline. It's implied that he was killed for this, with his awesome coat being hung on the house like a sick victory flag.
- Other Father wasn't mute, but he was a very upbeat dude and just plain sweet guy. He's steadily being punished for trying to help Coraline, is beaten up by his own piano, and is forced to fight Coraline, trying his best to hold himself back so she can run, all while shouting "I'm so sorry, don't wanna hurt you!" in a disoriented voice. Falls into a bottomless pond and drowns near the end of the film, though the drowning at least allows him a Heroic Sacrifice ending, as he throws Coraline one of the objects she has to find to win against the Other Mother as he's going under. And the Other Mother makes him slowly mutate into a pumpkin-thing. Seriously!
- The ghost children. They were lured away from their homes, had their souls stolen by a monster and were locked up in a closet for decades, forced to live with the knowledge that if they hadn't given in to their greed, they wouldn't have been trapped.
- Coraline herself, as her parents never have any time for her and she clearly really misses her friends back home. The Other Mother preys upon her loneliness and resentment of her parents to create the "perfect" world in an attempt to make her want to stay forever. When Coraline resists, the Other Mother kidnaps her parents, dismantles Other Wybie and nobody in the real world believes her, leaving Coraline alone and with no idea where her parents have gone.
- The Korean short film Doggy Poo has the title character, who spends most of the time pondering its purpose in life and crying its little eyes out. It does get a happy ending where a dandelion sprout asks to be fertilized by it.
- Free Jimmy is about a severely abused and drug-addicted elephant who escapes from the Circus of Fear that was keeping him drugged up and is chased by several groups of people who all want to kill or capture him for selfish reasons and has to suffer through drug withdrawal symptoms. And just when it seems he has escaped his pursuers, he gets shot and dies of a drug overdose due to the bullet passing though a pack of drugs that was stored in his body.
- James and the Giant Peach:
- Mr. Centipede is hated and abused by all the other bugs all the time, particularly by Mr. Grasshopper. By the middle-end of the movie, the other bugs turned on him because they counted on him to lead the way to New York after he bragged that he had been there before, but he failed because he fell asleep and lost a sense of direction.
- James himself. His wonderful, loving parents are eaten by a rhino, then he is forced to live with his two wicked aunts, who treat him as a slave and verbally abuse him all the time.
- Kung Fu Panda: Po starts off a bit as a Butt-Monkey in the first movie, but later on when he shows just how insecure he is about being the Dragon Warrior, or how doubtful he is about being anything more than a noodle maker's fat panda son, you start to realize he had to go through a lot of crap for most of the movie. He gets to meet his idols, The Furious Five, but Shifu and most of them treat him awfully for a fair portion of the film. During those scenes you just want to hug him and cheer for him as he gets up again and again even after all the hits and insults thrown at him. The sequel also has moments where you just want to hug him. First off there's how bothered he is about how he doesn't know what happened to his real parents, and the flashbacks he gets with Shen. Then comes when he finds out that Shen slaughtered all the pandas in China, and Po has to come to terms that he's probably the only panda left in the land. But you find out at the end of the movie that his father and other pandas are still living somewhere.
- The Land Before Time: Littlefoot. No one should have to watch their mom die before their eyes like he did. The scene later on where he's crying in her footprint just makes it worse.
- The LEGO Movie:
- Emmet. He's a very friendly guy but then the fact that a lot of people he considered friends don't really care much about him or even remember who he was. No wonder he wants to be special.
- There's also Unikitty, as she watches the destruction of Cloud Cuckoo Land.
- Madagascar: Melman when he learns his crush Gloria was taken by Moto Moto in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. That's not all, the other giraffes thought he was going to die, leading him to become gullible enough to listen to King Julien and nearly fall into the volcano. Be thankful Gloria saved his life.
- Private in Penguins of Madagascar. From what we know, his family lost his egg and didn't attempt to look for it. And that's just the beginning! He was totally unappreciated by other members of team, then he was captured by Dave and had to watch his adoptive brothers getting mutated into monsters. Combine this with his Nice Guy personality and cuteness and you got A-Grade woobie.
- The Madeline films have two:
- Fifi becomes this in Lost in Paris since her supervisor is a Bad Boss who demands that Fifi works her ass off every day, and Fifi has no say in what she gets to do. What really makes the cake is that said supervisor pulls a Never My Fault by telling her to work with black lace for coughing and sneezing. Make no mistake that supervisor was the real guilty party for Fifi's sickness, and Madeline was pissed when she witnessed this, to the point where she came to Fifi's defense, only to become a downplayed version when the supervisor jails Madeline for it.
- Madeline herself becomes an exaggerated variation during the events of My Fair Madeline when she spots two thieves robbing the place, and nobody believes her, and she gets put in a Trauma Conga Line that leads to her home franchise's (likely) death.
- The Nightmare Before Christmas:
- Sally. All the things she does for someone who doesn't seem to (at first) return her feelings is heart-breaking. Add in that she's The Cassandra and has an unhappy home and she's definitely a woobie.
- Jack himself. A guy who gets tired of his job might sound whiny, but not when you consider that he lives in a town where it's all about said job. Put that on top of the fact that a lot of the responsibility for Halloween is on his shoulders, and all you have to say is "That's rough, buddy". Also since Jack is Dem Bones he might be Really 700 Years Old, who knows how long he was doing the same thing every year. 10 years? 50 years? 100 years? Since Halloween was created? And he's also the biggest in-universe celebrity. That's got to be exhausting.
- Once Upon a Forest: Michelle falls into a life-threatening coma after being exposed to chlorine gas. She does recover, but finds out shortly after that her parents weren't so lucky.
- Paranorman: Norman is just trying to fix everything, is way over his head, and most of the town ostracizes him. Seeing him receive what is basically a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from Agatha with electricity is really heart-rending.
- The Pebble and the Penguin: Hubie is a meek penguin who just wants to woo the girl of his dreams, but he's cast off by the villain into the sea and has to go through a perilous journey to return home, which is a race against the clock as the villain is intent in forcing his love interest to mate with him instead.
- The Plague Dogs: Snitter is such a Woobie. He had a happy home with a good Master, but then one day his Master gets hit by a car and poor Snitter is blamed and given to the White Coats, who then perform nasty surgery on his brain to separate the subjective from the objective. So he has to suffer through madness, physical and emotional pain from the operation, starving in the wild upon escaping the White Coats, and the trauma of his old Master's death as well as accidentally killing another man that could have been a new Master. "Everything bad comes out of my head," he believes. All the poor puppy wants is a home and peace of mind. And even worse, unlike in the book, his Master isn't still alive to rescue him. Instead, the movie ends with it looking like Snitter will drown, searching for an island.
- The Secret of NIMH: Mrs. Brisby almost certainly deserves a place here, going through all manner of hell to save her dying son. It doesn't help she's clearly terrified of everything she meets.
- Spies in Disguise: Walter loses his mother at a young age when she is killed in action, and spends his entire life being dismissed and bullied for being "weird" simply because he wants to make gadgets that protect rather than destroy.
- Wolfwalkers is a story of two young girls forging a forbidden friendship during a violent time in European history. When their opposing worlds come into conflict, it is inevitable that they get put through some serious emotional turmoil.
- Robyn wants to be a hunter like her father, but this goes against the puritanical social conventions of the time, which dictate that she should stay at home or toil in the scullery instead. She is also bullied by local children for being English. When she proposes a solution to ridding Kilkenny of its wolf problem without killing them, she gets scolded by her father for disobeying the Lord Protector's orders and her stories dismissed as tall tales. When she becomes a Wolfwalker, her father doesn't hesitate to try and kill her in her wolf form, and in her human body, she's threatened with the stocks for speaking out against the Lord Protector. Following Mebh's mother's wishes, she forces her best friend away and then betrays her to keep her safe. Even after she successfully reunites Mebh with her mother, this is immediately dashed to pieces when her own father shoots Mebh's mother mere moments later. She finally has no choice but to reveal to him that she's become a Wolfwalker and can no longer live in human society, choosing to go after Mebh and the wolves despite his pleading her to stay.
- If Robyn is put through the emotional wringer, Mebh is put through the whole emotional laundromat. The story starts with she and her mother being the last of their kind, with human settlement encroaching on their woods. Her mother goes off to find a new home as a wolf, leaving Mebh alone with only her unconscious human body and the wolf pack as comfort. She may not admit it, but she is desperate for human company and is deeply worried for her mother. After being stood up by Robyn for the second time, she ventures into town, only for her friend to tell her to leave instead of helping to find Mebh's mother as she promised. Then she sees her mother being put on display with the townspeople calling for her death. Then Robyn betrays her and puts her in a cage with the town bullies. She breaks out, but she can't free her mother. When Robyn helps Moll escape and the two reunite, that one happy moment gets violently torn away from her when her mother gets shot, forcing her to desperately try to heal her mortally-wounded mother while faced with the destruction of everything she knows and loves. She is in tears and her voice chokes throughout the entire third act when it's made clear that her healing abilities aren't strong enough to save her mother; it's a miracle she didn't shut down completely. She may be a Wolfwalker, but she's also a little girl who's afraid of losing the only family she has left.
