In life, crying represents a loss of control — a cathartic release of neurobiological tension that science hasn’t entirely figured out. But when you watch a character cry in animation, it’s the opposite. Heaving sobs and effervescent teardrops are the result of the exacting labor of artists who must precisely illustrate, iterate on, time, and log their work on a budget. Making all that controlled effort look spontaneous and, above all, natural is never an easy feat in animated filmmaking.
“There’s this beautiful solution in Whisper of the Heart,” says cartoonist and Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar, citing one of Studio Ghibli’s fan-favorite titles. In some scenes of director Yoshifumi Kondo’s film, Sugar explains, Ghibli’s artists chose to draw the lines of the inside of their weeping characters’ eyes as red instead of the usual black. “It’s so subtle. It’s the difference of painting a single line,” Sugar says, “but you feel the impact so strongly.”
Of course, Ghibli’s prodigious talent pool makes it look easy. As Sugar and four other animators interviewed for this story made clear, animating even the simplest single tear requires many layers of dedication and care. Storyboards must be drawn, droplets must be designed (and redesigned and redesigned and redesigned, and then colorized), and exposure sheets must define how fast the tears fall, according to animators’ sensibilities and adherence to the laws of physics. “It’s a lot to keep track of,” Sugar says. “Choices like that have to be really aggressively planned.”
To learn more about how those choices were realized onscreen, we asked the animators below how they created some of the most powerful crying scenes of their careers and what challenges they overcame to do so. Read ’em and weep.
BoJack Horseman: BoJack fails to cry, then breaks down
Matt Mariska, episode director: In the scene, BoJack is supposed to cry or break down for the film that he’s making, Secretariat. He doesn’t cry, and he thinks he’s failed, but that was good enough for Secretariat’s director. But then afterward, he’s anxious. He doesn’t think he’s good enough, full of all this self-doubt: Am I good enough? Am I a joke or am I an actor? He goes outside and breaks down. And it’s perfectly BoJack that he’s asked to cry, is so anxious about it that he can’t do it, and then as soon as that anxiety’s out of his life, he breaks down.
An ugly, solo cry was the direction for the scene. I looked through old emails: “It should be a soft, real moment of BoJack crying. This shouldn’t be a single tear or overly broad sobbing. It should look ugly and broken. He exhales and breaks down.” There was another note I found: “Add tears.” So at some point we were having him cry without tears. Probably the audio was recorded, where he’s going “huhh, huhh, huhh” in the scene, but there was no wetness on his face. At some point, we decided it would be better with tears.
In scenes like this, I would make sure to not overdo it, especially if you want it to mean something. If you’re going for comedy, overdoing it is fine. Here, less is more. It’s almost like you’re trying to make sure the character is trying not to cry. It takes a lot of iteration, seeing it again and again and again, and it’s many different people that you’re dealing with. Animation is a team sport. It’s notes and notes and notes and notes and notes and revision and revision: “Try it like this. Okay, try that. Okay, it’s not working with the camera push. Let’s try it without the camera push. Okay, now let’s try it on a close-up. Okay, now let’s have him look down before he looks up.” It’s trying so many things, and you kind of know when it works.
As silly as BoJack can be, we tried to play moments like this as honestly as we could. I don’t think we would want BoJack to cry in a funny way. It wouldn’t mean anything. If this is one of the only times he cries on the show, that’s really cool. He’s, in a way, crying about crying.
Vinland Saga: Thorfinn reunites with his mother
Takahiko Abiru, animation director: In season one, Thorfinn loses his father, leaves home, and goes out for revenge. I think he loses himself and what his axis is that defines him. At the end of season two, he returns to the island he came from after 15 years and reunites with the family he’s forgotten. He isn’t sure how to behave when all of these emotions start coming back. He’s trying to say he’s sorry and to atone for everything he’s done, but after seeing his mother cry, there’s a bit of shock — her tears, the 15 years that have passed, how his mother has aged, how she’s been worried about him. His expression slowly begins to change, and his sorrow surfaces as tears.
As animators, when we try to get the characters’ performances onscreen, it’s very important to listen to what the voice actors are doing in the booth. We’ll have these voice files as reference. I try to listen to them before animating. Listening to Thorfinn and Helga’s performances, I’m able to imagine what the characters and what the actors are going through in those moments. Imagining that helps translate what we do with the character’s performances onscreen. Based on what we’re hearing, the different levels, the volume, the emotion — we’ll decide how much to open their mouth, what the performance is going to look like, how often they blink, what their eyes are doing, and even the angle of their eyebrows.
With season one, we were still trying to figure out the production process with the entire team. I found myself looking constantly at the original work: the manga in one hand, drawing in the other. Season two was much more emotional. Instead of looking at the manga while animating, I was looking at the mirror quite often while animating, creating expressions that we wanted the character to emulate when they’re performing. Of course, it’s very hard to cry on cue, but I tried to emotionally invest myself in what the characters were experiencing at any given moment. I would try to tap into my past experiences that would put me in that state of mind and then look into the mirror and try to translate that performance into the characters.
The production timelines for anime are quite tight. We don’t have a long schedule, and we don’t have a lot of breaks or vacations. At times I do want to cry! So perhaps I should take those opportunities to do a little more R&D on the emotion and expression of crying and translate that into anime characters.
Turning Red: Mei and her friends see 4*TOWN
Domee Shi, director: There are a lot of crying scenes in Turning Red. One of my favorites is the scene with Mei and her friends at the 4*TOWN concert. When Robaire and 4*TOWN finally come up onstage, we do this really, really fast snap zoom into Mei and her friends’ faces where they react and start crying tears of joy. I always loved that moment of the main character’s wishes coming true. All of those emotions well up — there’s snot coming from her nose, her eyes are glistening, there’s globs of tears running down her face. It’s a really funny moment, but it’s also very emotional.
Everything in animation is so choreographed. Behind every crying scene, there’s dozens of conversations and reviews about the level of water in the eye: Where would it build? Does it build in the corner? Does it build in the middle? Does it build in the inner corner? The viscosity of the tear has to be taken into consideration, too. We don’t want watery, thin tears that just stream down the face; I want thick surface tension. The glob builds for a period of time around the eye before it breaks and turns into a stream that falls down the character’s face. When the tear travels down our face, does it leave a wet trail? Do we see that shiny wet trail? Because in some of these scenes, it’s a very intimate close-up! Are we seeing the shiny wetness trail, or is that distracting? Would we rather have the tear go down and leave a slight trail? Maybe that trail dries up almost immediately afterward. When she’s a red panda, you have to think about wet fur: How would that wet trail look on wet fur versus human skin? In the end, we just come up with some rules and do whatever doesn’t take us out of the moment, instead of trying to be true to the realism of it. We want to keep her nice and fluffy and keep her silhouette appealing and engaging. So we just did the cheat of it rolling down her face.
Tears count as an effect. And on our shows, on our films, there’s a specific budget for effects. Even if it’s one tear. A tear, a flame on a stovetop, or an explosion are all kind of weighed the same for some reason in how our budgets work. So sometimes I felt a little bad that I wanted to add a little tear here and there, but in the end, it helps sell the emotion, so it makes it worth it. It was funny that a single tear is valued the same as an explosion onscreen. It might actually be just as impactful.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio: Geppetto loses a second son
Mark Gustafson, director: In many ways, Pinocchio is the story of Geppetto more than it is about Pinocchio: It’s about him learning to be a good father. He’s learned that at this point, and yet it’s too late. Pinocchio is dead. That’s pretty heavy stuff. We felt like we had license to push it pretty far in terms of the physical reaction he would have.
Kristien Vanden Bussche was the very talented animator who did Geppetto’s crying on the beach. You have to have the right animator, particularly in stop-motion, because the end process is so narrowed down to just one animator and a puppet or puppets. It really is the expression of that artist. You have to cast them very carefully so that you know they truly understand where the character is and where the crying is coming from.
From a purely technical point of view, one of the challenges with stop-motion is working in real space. You’re dealing with a real puppet, and it takes hours, days, sometimes weeks to do a shot. When you get into tears, it’s a liquid, and it wants to evaporate. So we use glycerin gels and different types of oil. Animators have different preferences for what they want to use for the actual tears in the eyes, because it has to be as stable as you can, and it tends to evaporate over time, so you have to refresh it. And you have to do something that’s not going to destroy the puppet. You can’t put chemicals or things on it that are going to stain it.
A lot of times in stop-motion, we have the animator act it out themselves, so if you’ve cast them right, you get to see what they’re thinking before they animate. We also had the performance of the actor — David Bradley in this case, an absolutely brilliant man and performer. We shot footage of him while he was recording, so there were a bunch of cues from his face and body language we were able to use as well. But you just hear his voice and it tells you volumes. That gets you 80 percent of the way there: I see what this is. I see exactly how far he’s pushing or how much he’s pulling back in this moment. As long as we honor that with the puppet’s performance, we’re in good shape.
Steven Universe: Steven puts himself back together
Rebecca Sugar, director: When I started writing and storyboarding for Adventure Time, it was quite challenging and controversial to have those characters cry. It was often taken out of sequences because of concerns that a show with a target audience of 6- to 11-year-old boys would be alienated by or upset by sequences with crying and tears. When I was told not to do it, it made me want to do it more. I started to really be interested in the limits of showing characters cry in a cartoon for that particular demographic. Early on in creating Steven Universe, we knew we wanted these really emotional story lines: I wanted Steven to be the kind of character who could cry, and it would make sense for him to cry for a myriad of different reasons and in a lot of different visual styles, flexible to accommodate the drawing styles of different storyboard artists who were also writing these sequences.
And this was such an important sequence. It was animated by James Baxter, someone so famously incredible at animating dancing. The tearful, shoulder-shaking cry that he animated — along with the dance and the rotation — was many years in the making and was really its own unique process to animate, compared to any other moment in the show. Years earlier, he asked if I would do a drawing to gift to his daughter for her birthday. I came to this party and gave this drawing, and he said, “If you would ever like me to do some animation for a sequence as a thank-you,” that he would do that. For years, we were all waiting for a sequence important enough to have his touch on it. And we knew this one would have to be the one, in the series finale, “Change Your Mind.” We wanted it to be Steven Universe’s most ultimate Fusion Dance. Baxter invented the idea of one of the two Stevens standing on the other one’s feet, almost like a parent and child, so that they’re dancing in this supportive and unique way no other characters on the show had danced in. It’s very subtle.
For Steven Universe, we had to design probably more than a dozen different styles of tears. They had different names. Sometimes they’d have to have color, some would have little highlights on them, and some would hang on the eyes but they wouldn’t fall. We had one in particular, which we called “Ghibli Tears” on the model sheet, because they were the big, fat, Spirited Away droplets streaming down the cheeks. Then there was a particular One Piece style — a stream cry that had its own unique design, which was a flat color that went from the eyeballs to the chin, down the face, and they flickered and vibrated. In this sequence, there’s a little highlight on a tear that drips. That’s a certain tear design that has this little pointed shape at the top, a drag that shows how it breaks from the eyeball. It’s traveling, so it’s important to know where it will go. Or for a joke, milky-white tears. Or if it’s a really serious moment, transparent tears. If it’s a night scene, you can’t just take a design of tears from the daytime and call it done; you’ll have to create a special palette for the way that it’s reflective against moonlight or how they look if they’re transparent. It’s animation, so everything is bespoke. And it’s television animation, so you have to be as efficient as possible, but especially since crying sequences were so important to the show, many of them were very, very bespoke.
We liked to give a lot of that power to our storyboard artists. And so, for example, the streaming tears — the ones that are going from eyes to chin and stay the whole time — what I would do is see through how those tears and how that sequence was expressed. As a director, it’s my responsibility to say, “Well, to support this storyboard image, we need to create a special drawing so that we know what color his snot is.” Very granular. But you’re faced with a choice: Do we take out the snot so that we don’t have to create a unique design just to streamline production? And more often than not, I would say, “No, I want to honor the snot.”
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