21 of the Saddest Scenes Where Nobody Dies

When was the last time a movie made you cry? Mufasa’s death? Snape’s death? The death of the shoe in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Are you sensing a pattern here? The easiest way to wring some cheap tears out of an audience is to murder a beloved character, but that’s the coward’s way out. The real masters know how to leave you staring into the abyss without anyone, even a magical Nazi, needing to die.

Redditor Ok-Impress-2222 gets this. “When talking about sad scenes in movies, the majority of what gets mentioned are scenes of a character’s death, understandably,” they recently told r/Movies. “But that exact notion makes it all the more interesting to try and name a sad scene that isn’t a death scene.” They named “the last scene of Pursuit of Happyness” and “Jessie’s backstory from Toy Story 2” as their “personal favorites” and then asked, “What’s the saddest non-death scene in a movie?”

Fair warning: A good percentage of them involve Haley Joel Osment.