The 14 Best Anime About Illness
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Your Lie in April deals with some pretty heavy subject matter, focusing on young musical prodigies forced into adulthood by childhood trauma and chronic illness. Kaori Miyazono, a talented violinist who appears full of life, secretly has a deadly disease. The exact illness is never specified, but fans speculate it may be Friedreich's ataxia or autoimmune hemolytic anemia.
Kaori's illness not only causes her to miss out on pursuing her musical career, but also pushes her to hide her romantic feelings for protagonist Kousei Arima. She and Kousei face difficulties unimaginable to many adults, making Your Lie in April an extremely emotional watch.
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Since birth, Nagisa Furukawa has suffered from an unnamed hereditary illness that causes repeated bouts of fever, weakness, and pain. Throughout Clannad, she faces repeated attacks of this illness, which cause her to miss school and other social experiences. In Clannad: After Story, it becomes a much larger problem, leading to her death after giving birth to her daughter, Ushio.
Clannad does something with Nagisa's plot that few anime do. When Nagisa expresses concern that she burdens her parents with her problems and prevents them from achieving their dreams, they loudly declare she has done no such thing, and their job is to take care of her and watch her achieve her dreams. It's not uncommon for people with a chronic illness or disability to feel like a burden, so it's refreshing to see Nagisa's parents explicitly reject such fears.
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Whether it's Tohru's father catching a cold that becomes fatal pneumonia, Yuki's weak immune system and asthmatic lungs, or Akito's general sickliness, illness constantly hangs overhead in Fruits Basket. It terrifies Tohru, who, after her father's demise, fears the mildest sicknesses could turn deadly. When Yuki catches a cold, Tohru can barely contain her worry - and when he passes out from lack of oxygen, she only feels more validated.
Disease serves as a major source of tension in the anime version. Akito (raised as a male, but later revealed to be female) has health issues that stay largely in their head in the manga, but in the anime, they're quite real. The curse that causes the rest of the Sohma family to transform into animals makes Akito so sick, they can barely leave the house and require constant care from a doctor.
Bitter and resentful of their constrained life, Akito lashes out at their family, physically assaulting them and verbally berating them when they pursue goals and relationships outside the home. Akito believes their own ill health results from the strain of their role in the curse, and thus the family owes them infinite loyalty. What's more, Akito can't stand the thought of their cursed relatives overcoming their situations to find satisfaction and meaning.
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Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood doesn't exactly dwell on illness as a plot point, but one character's health sparks the protagonist's primary goal. Trisha Elric dies after contracting an unnamed disease some fans suspect to be tuberculosis, leaving her two young sons orphaned and hellbent on bringing her back. To do this, they learn as much alchemy as they possibly can and attempt to perform a human transmutation. This results in Ed losing an arm and a leg, and Al losing his entire body.
Trisha's illness isn't the only one that resonates throughout the series. Ed endures physical pain as a result of his loss of limbs, and his teacher Izumi Curtis permanently damaged her organs trying her own human transmutation, which causes her to cough up blood and have frequent dizzy spells. Instead of merely portraying someone struggling with illness, FMA:B also shows how life changes after you lose someone to disease.Poignant story?- Photo:
On the surface, My Neighbor Totoro tells the story of two young girls exploring nature with the help of the titular gentle giant. However, the reason why they need the comfort of Totoro and Catbus and all the other wonderful creatures they encounter is their mother is in the hospital with an unnamed illness that may or may not take her life. The girls are worried, but too young to directly address their feelings, so Totoro serves as a form of reassurance and distraction as they process the realities of their mother's condition.
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The Ancient Magus' Bride
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While never named as such, illness serves as one of the major themes of The Ancient Magus' Bride. Chise Hatori, the protagonist, is a magical being called a sleigh beggy, a person who attracts magic. Because her body is too weak to actually handle the magic, it makes her frail and sickly. What's more, at the end of the series, she acquires a dragon's curse that makes her even sicker and threatens to kill her if she fails to find a way to break it.
The series' primary antagonist, Joseph, also labors under some serious physical issues. Though immortal thanks to a curse placed on him when he merged with a man named Cartaphilus, Joseph's body doesn't function like that of an immortal. Instead, he spends millennia trying to stop his flesh from rotting off his body, and enduring excruciating sickness and pain. To stave off his suffering, Joseph performs endless experiments on people, losing all sense of ethical perspective in the process.
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While most of Sword Art Online doesn't focus on illness, the second half of the second season explores the possibilities of virtual reality as a form of therapy. The Medicuboid, a machine that enables a severely ill person to enter virtual reality on a near-continuous basis, allows a patient to rest, receive treatment, escape from their pain, and pursue a fuller life than the one their own body could.
Yuuki Konno is dying of AIDS, but the Medicuboid alleviates the process. It provides her the opportunity to interact with other terminally ill people who share her experience, but with whom she can't personally interact due to her compromised immune system. Not only does she meet kindred spirits, but Yuuki also gets to go on adventures and forms a genuine bond with one of the show's protagonists, Asuna.
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Looking Up At The Half-Moon
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Yuuichi Ezaki lives in the hospital with hepatitis A. As a result of his illness, he's isolated from family and friends and bored out of his mind. He eventually meets Rika Akiba, a fellow patient at the hospital. While Rika is tempestuous and difficult to get along with - and Yuuichi isn't all that patient himself - the two slowly begin to develop a relationship. Unfortunately, by the time they begin to appreciate each other, it may be too late. Rika's condition isn't a curable one; it's a congenital heart defect that killed her father and may end up killing her, too.
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Full Moon O Sagashite
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Mitsuki Koyama wants to be a professional singer more than anything in the world. Unfortunately, her body doesn't agree. When she develops throat cancer, she's faced with a choice: get surgery to remove the cancer and risk losing her voice, or leave the cancer untreated and risk her life. When two death gods appear to inform her she only has a year to live, she decides to use that time to live to the fullest and pursue her dreams.
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Shuichi Kuze finds out he has a fatal degenerative heart disease. He reacts to this news by dumping his fiancée, donating many of his possessions, and freezing out his friends. Expecting to die within the year, Kuze doesn't want to inflict his decline on anyone else. But Mizuki Hayama, a teenage girl visiting Kuze's neighbor, has other ideas. She rapidly falls in love with the dying 30-year-old and does everything she possibly can to insert herself into his life. He rebuffs her both because she's underage and due to his desire to die in peace, but as time passes, the two grow closer.
When Kuze undergoes an experimental surgery, his life expectancy extends by a few years - enough time to begin to rebuild his life, and enough time for Mizuki to become an adult whose love he can reciprocate.
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Hikari Yagami, known as Kari Kamiya in the Digimon dub, has always been sickly. In fact, she misses going to the Digital World in the first place because she's too ill to attend summer camp with her brother, Taichi. That's why she doesn't show up until much later in the series.
When Taichi is 7 and Hikari is 4, their parents task Taichi with looking after his ill sister. Bored and too young to realize the potential consequences, he takes his sister to the playground. The exertion results in Hikari developing pneumonia and needing to be hospitalized. Despite the whole being 7 thing, their mother blames Taichi for Hikari's condition and slaps him across the face. This causes him to develop a complex about his sister's health and an unusual sense of responsibility to protect her.
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- March Comes in Like a Lion
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The truly bizarre series Mawaru Penguindrum kicks off with an illness. Himari Takakura suffers from an unnamed terminal disease that kills her on a trip to an aquarium. To her brothers' surprise, Himari returns from the dead thanks to a penguin hat from the aquarium's souvenir store. Her body now provides a home to an unknown being who keeps her alive, but at a cost. If her brothers want her to stay in the realm of the living, they must go in search of an object called the Penguin Drum.
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You might not expect a disease to afflict a great Saiyan warrior, but one Dragon Ball Z arc proves they can be vulnerable, too. Goku contracts a heart virus that causes severe chest pain, exhaustion, and eventually death. In one timeline, the illness kills him, which prompts Future Trunks to travel back in time to provide him with a medication that hadn't been developed at the time of Goku's death. Thanks to Future Trunks's intervention, Goku still contracts the illness but only stays out of commission for 10 days.
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