The Woobie/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


"If it's always once upon a time in New York City, why does nightfall find you feeling so alone?"

It might be worth pointing out that the term "Woobie" perhaps was first used in the 1980's Michael Keaton movie Mr. Mom. And incidentally, Kenny, the boy who owned the blanket he called "Woobie", was played by Taliesin Jaffe, who eventually grew up to write and direct numerous Superlative Anime Dubs, including both TV and OVA versions of Hellsing. Which means, yes, the boy with the Woobie wrote Jan Valentine's dialogue.

As for movies with a character who is a Woobie ... well, see the examples below.

  • Oliver the cat, (pictured right) from Oliver and Company. Nearly getting washed down the drain, actually getting chased by big, vicious dogs, ending up trying to get food from a hot dog vendor and kicked into the wall, and then when he gets help from a dog named Dodger to steal them, Dodger keeps them all for himself and goes back home. Oliver follows Dodger, despite being put through a variety of pranks along the way, and when he gets to Dodger's home, he is surrounded by a gang of dogs who hate him and want him dead. He wins them over by clawing in the face a vicious doberman who is an enemy of said dog gang, and then is expected to take part in said dog gang's criminal activities in service of their owner. So when Oliver is watching over while one dog helps hotwire a car, he slips and falls into a mess of wires. The little girl in the car adopts him, and brings him home to a vain show dog who is jealous of him even having a PORTION of said little girl's attention, and manipulates said dog gang to take him back when they show up. Even this becomes a moot point when said little girl gets kidnapped by a crime boss anyway, and said crime boss chases the dog gang's owner into the rails of the New York subway system. Oliver leaps to Jenny's defense, biting said crime boss in the hand and leaping onto the face of one of said crime lord's attack dogs. While we're not shown exactly what happened next, Oliver is implied from his Disney Death to have been ALMOST killed by it.
    • Jenny as well, to a lesser extent, being a Lonely Rich Kid who gets a cat only for him to be taken away pretty quickly, then getting kidnapped herself.
  • Little Shop of Horrors has two Woobies living in a Crapsack World called Skid Row: Seymour Krelborn and Audrey. Seymour was an orphan, raised by his boss, Mr. Mushnik, who treats him like dirt and forces him to sweep the floor. Seymour was in love with Audrey and would do anything to win her heart, and that's where Audrey II came in. Meanwhile, Audrey was in an abusive relationship with Orin Scrivello D.D.S., a crazy and sadistic dentist, but she actually has feelings for Seymour.
  • Andrew in Bicentennial Man.
  • The Boy in the Plastic Bubble Todd growing up in incubator doesn't really build social skills.
  • Michael from The Blind Side is so much the Woobie that the Tuohys take him in and eventually adopt him.
  • Ben X is a Flemish film about an autistic teenager who is mercilessly bullied at school because he does not know how to stand up for himself. The film is pretty much all about his misery and self-pity and does not explore anything else about his personality.
  • Gary at the end of The Last American Virgin.
  • Eduardo Saverin in "The Social Network", especially when you realize that this is all based on a true story...
  • Harry Osborn from the Spider-Man films, son of Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin. Harry's in the comics, too, but woobification seems to have eluded him there: not only is he portrayed, prior to his death, as an abusive husband and father, occasional drug addict, and all-around nasty piece of work (albeit not entirely unsympathetically), he's also drawn to look significantly less attractive than James Franco.
    • Sandman from Spider-Man 3. He just wants to cure his daughter from some mysterious illness but since he doesn't has the money for medical care, he was in desperation forced to do crime in order to get them. In one of his robberings, he accidentally killed Uncle Ben, a mistake that would hunt him with much remorse and guilt. When he got his super powers, he decided to use them in order to get the money, but not before visting his daughter, giving her the post cards he had written for her but wasn't allowed to send. After the final battle with Spider-Man, in which both Harry and Eddie died, he's obviously in deep regret of the sistuation he played part off that went out of hand and the last scene has him asking Spider-Man for forgiveness for the pain he had caused him.
  • Donnie Darko from Donnie Darko. One one hand he has a loving family, but on the other hand he experiences mental illness, unrelenting paranormal apparitions, a moronic and restrictive education system, puberty (and its associated existential angst), assault at knifepoint (twice), and the tragic death of his girlfriend (which drives him to second degree murder). And after all that he elects to be fatally crushed by a rogue jet engine in order to protect his family, girlfriend, Frank and possibly the rest of Earth's population, according to which hypothesis you subscribe to. And after all of that his sacrifice remains ultimately unsuspected. On top of that, he is portrayed by (a teenage) Jake Gyllenhaal, whose cuddly face and baby-blue eyes render him an Extreme Hardcore woobie, aesthetically if nothing else.
    • To say nothing of his sister. Seeing her at the end, you just want to hug her brains out.
      • Very true. Both the Gyllensibs are adorable.
  • Laura Palmer, from the Twin Peaks television series and especially in the Twin Peaks prequel film (which is the only time she's seen alive). Given how the entire town mourns her death, and all the horrors and torment she went through, she's the ultimate Woobie. Death was an improvement over her life.
  • Norman Bates, from Psycho. His mother isolated him from the outside world, making him totally dependent on her, and then mentally abused him. No wonder poor Norman goes a little mad sometimes. He practically exudes neediness and awkward sweetness. Plus, he's played with boyish charm by the handsome Anthony Perkins. He's in even more need of a hug in the sequel, where the vulnerable Norman has to tolerate Gaslighting.
  • Milton Dammers, from The Frighteners. He is a mass of phobias and nerves, highly-strung to the point where he seems on the verge of pain. We find out that his early FBI assignments all involved going undercover in satanic cults, where he had to tolerate intensely mentally-damaging experiences, as well as physical and sexual trauma. When we see his bare chest, it is covered in ritual scars and his nipples seem to have been burnt off. It's hard to watch the movie without wanting to wrap him a blanket and massage his temples.
  • Charlie Baileygates in Me Myself and Irene. He gets taken advantage by everyone, even his own wife, Layla, who remarries to a black dwarf limo driver. All that sadness Charlie has and being taken advantage by everyone years later lead to Split Personality Hank to appear.
  • Private Jones, of 28 Days Later. Endeared to the viewer by wide-eyed hopefulness, youth and -- most importantly of all -- the ability to play scullery maid to a base full of soldiers, on less than quality rations whilst wearing a frilly pink apron. Talked out of suicide by officer-and-a-gentleman Major West, he goes on to cook, clean and generally be utterly endearing. He narrowly escapes a mauling by the zombie in the yard, by hiding in a cabinet -- also looking like he's about to cry -- and when he ventures out of his hiding place, he's impaled with a bayonet by the very human Jim. Soft-hearted women and slashers in the audience go into spasms of grief. The final straw that sends Major West straight through 'irritated' into 'Roaring Rampage of Revenge'. Rare instance of a survival horror woobie.
    • Of course, the woobie factor of Private Jones is pretty much evaporated just before he dies, as he didn't seem to have a problem with the soldiers executing Jim, and he also wasn't trying to stop the other soldiers from trying to rape the women.
    • Jim, if anything, is an even bigger woobie. He wakes up all alone and naked in an Abandoned Hospital and things continue to go downhill for him from there. He finds his home city is completely wiped out, gets chased by the raging infected loons, is mistreated by Selena, finds that his parents commited suicide, gets attacked and chased by the infected some more, is forced to kill an infected child and almost forced to do the same to Frank, and then almost killed by West's depraved soldiers who are about to rape Hannah and Selena. After all of this abuse, it's not suprising to see Jim snap the way he did.
  • 2 of the 3 leads in My Blue Heaven qualify for this trope. While FBI agent Barney Coopersmith was keeping an eye out on troublemaker Vincent "Vinnie" Antonelli so that he doesn't get in trouble, Barney's wife leaves him for a younger man, one of the reasons being how Barney eats his pancakes. Woobie #2 is policewoman Hannah Stubbs, who appears to be having a worse life than Barney. She and her husband are divorced, but he still visits her and their kids. At some point in the movie, it proves that being a Woobie is what Barney and Hannah have in common, and they have a romantic attraction to each other despite how they first met.
  • The film of 1408 consists almost entirely of John Cusack's character suffering woobiliciously. Poor thing.
    • And his daughter dies (several times) of Old Movie Disease.
  • Michelle from Elephant. It's hard to not draw parallels between her, Eric, and Alex, but for choosing to persevere through the bullying she endures, she's simply the first to die. Not that anyone expects Eric or Alex to survive the day.
  • The Breakfast Club is about five Woobies locked in a room together for a day. They share. They commiserate. They cry. And it's still funny.
  • Another John Hughes example is Sam from Sixteen Candles.
  • Arguably, three of the four main boys of Stand by Me are Woobies (the other is a Butt Monkey).
  • Most characters that Alan Rickman plays/voices seem subject to this trope. NOT Hans Gruber or Judge Turpin, though.
  • ALL the main characters in Toy Story 3. The whole film is about them weighing their options about whether they want to be thrown in the trash and be compacted/killed in the garbage system, stored in the attic for God-knows-how-long until their owner's own kids play with them again (if they're lucky), OR be donated to a day-care center! All while facing the fact of how their loving owner will never see them again. And don't forget that toys DO NOT AGE. Living in a world where everyone else changes and you don't is not fair, and it just makes you wanna' keep playing with your toys and love them forever!
    • It's also not hard to feel bad for the toys, such as Wheezy and Bo Peep, who had been sold or given away before the start of the film since they've experienced what the others fear most. Equally troubling is not knowning what actually became of them.
    • Also, Big Baby. His previous owner abandoned him, albeit unwittingly, and then he was lied to by Lotso and forced to do the bear's dirty work.
  • King Kong may well be the tropesetter in film. In production, they literally cut out less flattering footage of the monster's monstrosity when preview audiences cheered Kong's swatting a plane down on the Empire State pinnacle. It's rare to see attention to public opinion that strong, so not only is the mythic megagorilla possibly film's first Woobie, he's likely the first official Woobie.
    • In the 2005 film, we can also add Ann Darrow onto the list. To paraphrase Carl Denham, she's the saddest girl ever.
  • As in the books, Faramir from the The Lord of the Rings movies personifies Woobie as he rides out grimly on a suicide charge to please a father who can't be pleased.
    • And there's Frodo, who in the book was less woobieish than Sam, but when combined with Elijah Wood's enormous blue eyes becomes angst incarnate.
  • Balian from Kingdom of Heaven. his son was stillborn, his wife committed suicide, he kills his brother which forces him to flee his home and his father dies mere days after they met for the first time. As the movie progresses he becomes de-woobiefied, though.
  • WALL-E. Come on...give a poor trash-compacting robot a hug. You could practically call the titular robot WOOB-E. He's like a pure, undiluted example of this trope. Besides, he's provided the image for the main Woobie page.
    • Particularly interesting is how WALL-E develops into WOOB-E; in the first half of the movie, seeing him get hurt is usually funny, as he's the Butt Monkey until M-O appears. By the end of the movie, however, it's not funny at all -- and suddenly it never was.
      • It's bad enough you already wanna hug him by just looking at him.
    • This is precisely what got the guy nominated for five Academy Awards, one for Best Animated Feature, and the top slot of TIME Magazine's "Best Movies of the Decade." Say "wuh-ALL-ee" to any of your friends, and they'll smile and probably respond with "EEEE-vuh." You know a movie company's awesome like that when they can get the world to fall madly in love with a TRASH CAN.
    • Special mention should go to BURN-E, who suffered mishap after mishap in his own bonus-content special just trying to replace a light post on the Axiom. After experiencing a 2001-esque acid trip, getting baked in the Earth's atmosphere, and smashed into the dirt in an escape pod, he finally gets the light post turned back on...only to have it promptly smashed by the rogue door to the escape pod. Some days it just don't pay to get out of bed.
      • Whether he's a Woobie or a Butt Monkey is often up to the viewer; it could easily go either way depending on how sorry you feel for him.
  • An evolutionary predecessor to WOOB-E was Johnny Five from Short Circuit. Similar-looking, he gets the crap beat out of him by a gang of thugs in Short Circuit 2, which evokes a great deal of Woobie reaction from the audience (it made me cry as a kid). Cathartically, though, Johnny rebuilds himself into a robo-punk (complete with a leather "jacket" + mohawk) and gets his revenge with Bonnie Tyler blaring in the background... God, the 80s were awesome.
  • Monty from Daddy's Little Girls. His ex is a Complete Monster who gets custody of the kids simply because the've never been able to prove her boyfriend is a drug dealer. Her boyfriend beats the youngest one because she has Age Apropriate Angst. Not only that, but he was falsely imprisoned for rape when he was 18 because the girl lied about her age and cried "rape" her dad caught them. All he wants is to take care of his daughters and protect them from their mother and her boyfriend! Poor guy.
  • Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Poor dude.
  • Seymour from Ghost World. Unusual in that he has an aggressive trait (road rage), but his self-loathing and romance woes easily makes up for it in Woobifying him. They filmed two separate versions of the fight scene in the convenience store -- one in which he wins, and one in which he ends up in the hospital. Guess which one made it to the finished version?
  • Pirates of the Caribbean fans seem to either accept James Norrington or Ragetti as their Woobie. Except, of course, if they are Jack Sparrow fangirls.
  • Of course, when it comes to Johnny Depp characters, Sparrow can't hold a candle to poor Edward Scissorhands in terms of Woobie-ness. He loses his "father" and his only hope for a normal life all in one moment, his attempt to please Kim (who won't return his affection) turns the town against him, and although she comes to see how sweet he is, her Jerk Jock ex-boyfriend Jim makes matters worse out of jealousy and spite. Edward's eventually forced to retreat to his castle, and while she follows him, so does Jim. Edward kills him in the ensuing fight, sealing his own fate -- only if the lovers part can he survive. And he accepts this without question.
    • Even worse, you want to hold poor afflicted Edward ... but he can't.
  • Speaking of Depp, the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. The trauma of the Red Queen's takeover has turned him from delightfully mad into being somewhat traumatized and broken underneath his cheery demeanor.
    • The look on his face when he realizes that Alice is going to leave him just makes you want to cuddle him.
    • A lesser-known Depp role which qualifies is Don Juan Demarco. Poor lost manchild, abandoned and adrift, in desperate need of a father-figure. And just look at those eyes..
  • John (Nicholas Cage) in Knowing spends the entire film drinking to dull the pain of his wife's death, and witnessing gradually more horrific disasters. He is clearly traumatised by this, and by the end of the film (which I will avoid spoiling here) he just curls up in the rain and cries himself to sleep.
  • Diane Selwyn from Mulholland Drive definitely qualifies. Naomi Watts' performance really makes you feel for her.
  • George Bailey, George Bailey, George Bailey! It's a Wonderful Life is entirely devoted to destroying the man's life, hopes, and dreams, and when he manages to scrape together a happy family anyway, Uncle Billy accidentally hands eight grand over to Potter, putting the Building and Loan and George personally at risk. When you need Divine Intervention to show you what you're worth, you are a textbook Woobie.
  • Rogue of the X-Men films counts as one, especially in the first movie.
  • Carrie. Okay, so she killed about a hundred people, but it wasn't her fault, she was abused 'til she went crazy. And then her own mother stabbed her. Look at her cringing in the corner trying not to look at her mother, don't you just want to give her a hug?
  • Sam from The Descent. It wasn't enough for Neil Marshall to traumatise The Cutie, he went ahead and killed her brutally. In front of her loving, maternal, protective older sister, too. Although individual cases could be made for each of the other women too. Anyone want a go?
  • Edward Norton as Dr Bruce Banner in 2008 The Incredible Hulk.
  • Sadako (Samara in the remake) is such a Woobie that she even wins the sympathy of protagonist Reiko (resp. Rachel)... until the full extent of her curse becomes clear.
    • Even worse in the prequel, Ringu 0, where you see Sadako before being cursed, as a shy introverted girl with uncontrollable powers that terrify her. And she's bullied by people in her theater crew. You just want to hug her the whole movie, and all the sequels that came before it.
  • Broken Sword of the Wuxia film Hero/Ying Xiong qualifies as one, having scenes in every retelling of the story in which he gets run through with a sword, usually by his own lover.
    • The actor who portrays him, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, pretty much specializes in playing this type of character. See Infernal Affairs, Hard Boiled, or pretty much any of his films directed by Wong Kar-Wai. He probably qualifies as one in Real Life, too, since the reason he gives for being so good at emotional scenes is that his gambler father left his family when Leung was eight and after that he bottled up his emotions... and now uses acting as an outlet for them.
  • Tracey Berkowitz from The Tracey Fragments. The entire film is about Ellen Page in a shower curtain having a mental breakdown.
  • Nicolas Cage as David Spritz from The Weather Man. The poor guy constantly tries to make things right for people other than himself, and rarely gets thrown a bone.
    • Hell, half of the characters that Cage has ever played probably fall into the category. He's made a career out of playing the decent guy who just doesn't deserve the way that the entire universe is dumping on him (making him borderline Chew Toy).
  • Dr. Neville from I Am Legend certainly qualifies for this, having witnessed his wife and daughter killed, then later having to strangle his diseased dog which was his only companion for three years in an apocalyptic world.
  • Cameron Frye of Ferris Buellers Day Off. He might qualify as the Chew Toy or the Butt Monkey were it not for the fact that most--if not all--of his woes are either within his ability to change or exist wholly inside of his own head, and it is this inability or unwillingness to recognize his own self worth that results in his uptight, paranoid hypochondriac persona (resulting in his also being The Eeyore of the film). He doesn't fit perfectly into the Loser Archetype because he doesn't really make any attempt to rise above his current situation, but you still get the impression that he could benefit from a good hug.
  • Lars von Trier has used this trope a number of times.
    • Selma in Dancer in the Dark. One of the most archetypal examples of this trope ever.
    • Grace in Dogville.
  • Most of William H. Macy's roles qualify for this trope. The Cooler is actually a movie built around this trope.
  • An interesting example can be found in Midnight Cowboy. Rizzo starts off as a sleazy Jerkass, but he slowly devolves into a Woobie. This is mostly due to his Incurable Cough of Death.
    • Even moreso in the book, where he's more or less woobie from the very beginning and also seems to take advantage of it when deceiving guillible fools like, well, Joe Buck.
  • Nathan f*cking Wallace. Yes, he's been poisoning his daughter to keep her from leaving him and he moonlights as an organ repo man, but he's also spent the past seventeen years having the guilt for his wife's death constantly beaten into him by the guy who's really responsible. He's just so horribly broken that it's hard not to feel at least a little sympathetic.
  • Despite him not really having major problems, lots of people want to hug Chekov everytime he's on screen in the latest 2009 Star Trek movie. It's probably the facial expressions, especially when he fails to save Spock's mom. And the big, sad eyes... the accent tips him over right into Moe Moe territory, though.
    • This becomes more poingiant in "Star Trek Beyond" when you realize its the last film the actor will ever be in.
      • By all accounts, Anton Yelchin was a woobie in real life. A bright young star who cared more for the love of acting than the money, who decided to buy himself a nice new car with some of it. Because of a fault he probably didn't even know existed, his vehicle either shifted out of park or never registered being placed in park to begin with, and he wound up being pinned to a wall and killed by it. Hearing his parents talk about the situation, and others talk about working with him just makes everything sadder.
    • Spock also qualifies as the Woobie. Losing his captain, witnessing the distruction of his home planet and death of his mother, being accused of not having loved her ...
  • Goddamn, John Nash was a woobie in A Beautiful Mind.
  • Steve Wiebe of the documentary King of Kong. He blows the big game in high school, gets laid off on the day his family signs the contract on their house, and plays his heart out at Donkey Kong only to be repeatedly denied the recognition he deserves. He even weeps on camera.
  • E.T. Who would not be willing to shelter the poor alien from the government? And who doesn't cry at the end?
  • Celie from The Color Purple. Let's see... she was raped by her father twice, had children both times and had both promptly taken away, her mother died yelling at her, she was forced to marry a man she didn't even know, let alone like, who abused, raped, and forced her to do all the work around the house, including taking care of his bratty kids, who literally made her bleed the very first day she came. When her sister, who was the only person who actually cared about her came to stay, Celie's husband made his move on her, and when she refused, made her leave and kept her letters from Celie, making her think she was dead! And this is the first half hour, people...
  • In Downfall, Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge.
  • Cameron James from 10 Things I Hate About You.
    • Kate falls in there too, after she finds out that the only guy who was not afraid of her and appreciated her for who she was only went out with her because he was paid. This led up to her reading the titular poem and crying as she did so. Oh, and she wasn't supposed to cry, the actress just teared up as she read.
  • Bub from the original Day of the Dead. An undead creature hungry for human flesh has never been more sympathetic. The masterpiece of Dr. Logan's experiment of mental conditioning of zombies, his affection to his "trainer" is both genuine and touching. You really just want to hug him when he screams and cries after realizing that the good doctor is dead and is not coming back.
  • Huge Woobie played by Tobey Maguire in "The Wonder Boys". A decent writer who is first shown getting dumped on by fellow pretentious writers in one of the college classes he's taking, and is then shown to be obsessed with celebrity deaths or death in general, and possibly suicidal.
  • About a Boy. 'Nuff said.
  • If poor William from "Almost Famous" doesn't constitute a woobie, no one does. Based on Cameron Crowe's childhood, the movie shows a brilliant 15-year-old kid getting dumped on by everybody he encounters, many of whom are, of course, plenty nice to him at first.
  • Brandon Teena in Boys Don't Cry. 'Nuff said.
    • What's worse is that this movie was based on the true story of one of the most notorious hate crimes of the 90s.
  • Harry's character descends even further into the depths of woobiedom in the film version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, even more so than the book. Any of his scenes with Sirius (especially being comforted by Sirius), or having painful visions, or writhing on the damn ground possessed...
  • Jamal, from Slumdog Millionaire. And every non-villainous character associated with him.
  • Lars of Lars and the Real Girl is this trope personified. Mother died giving birth to him, father pretty much blamed him for it and became emotionally distant, older brother (probably the only stable person in his life) skipped town for several years and left him behind. He's so traumatized from his past that he feels physical pain when touched by others. He cannot have a normal relationship with the opposite sex (despite a co-worker practically throwing herself at him) and is so self conscious that the only one he can bring himself to connect with is a rubber sex toy. Yet, despite all that, he's still the sweetest, most innocuous guy ever.
  • Somehow, JCVD manages to turn Jean-Claude Van Damme into a Woobie.
  • Trainee Obara in the Japanese war film Ningen no Joken (The Human Condition)
  • The hunchback Ephialtes in 300 starts out like this.
  • Poor, poor Larry Gopnik from upcoming movie, A Serious Man. An everyday, average Jewish man in 1967 suburban Minneapolis who suffers one moment of despair after another. He tries the be the best person he can, despite: (1) his wife leaving the marriage for the whale like Sy Abelman, (2) getting dunning phone calls from a record club he's never heard of, (3)a brother, who is more of a wreck than he is, (4) living with an anti-Semitic neighbor who frequently encroaches on his property, (5) living with two children who are too self-involved to think beyond their own needs, and (6) getting anonymous letters assailing his moral turpitude as a physics teacher in school." His only dubious relaxation is listening to bass Sidor Belarsky's rendition of Yiddish song "The Miller's Tears".
  • Bill the malt shop owner in Pleasantville. If you don't want to hug him and tell him it's gonna be all right when the B&W mob destroys his diner and his art, you ain't human.
    • Arguably almost all of the characters who first turn to color. They've basically achieved a form of enlightenment and now are thrilled by the discovery of new knowledge and sensations. And because of this, they are hated and persecuted by the other people in the community.
  • 5 Angst Waffle from Nine.
  • Janet Colgate from the late '80s film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is, in all appearances, the ultimate Woobie- having won a chance sweepstakes for $50,000, she selflessly spends almost all of it on Lawrence Jamieson and Freddy Benson's scam to get Freddy to "walk again" after a "tragic accident". In the film she's giving, kind, naive, and trusting... until it is revealed at the end of the film that she knew what Lawrence and Freddy were up to all along and had been scamming them.
  • Dwight Frye's Renfield is absolutely adorable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOOYzlMT23g
  • Alfredo Linguini from Ratatouille. Poor guy.
  • Peter Lorre's characters. It doesn't matter what they do, up to and including killing children; Peter is always the woobie. This, along with the actor's troubled personal life (including exile, failure, divorce, and addiction) has led many a fangirl to just want to give him a hug and a bowl of soup.
  • I'm surprised no one's mentioned Truman Burbank from The Truman Show. He was abandoned as a child and everything in his life including his family and friends, is fake.
  • David from AI: Artificial Intelligence.
    • And what about Teddy...
  • Kirill from Eastern Promises -- by turns twisted, pathetic, in denial, and sick, yet by the end you really just want to hug him.
  • Crawford Tillenghast in "From Beyond". My God. The poor guy gets attacked by inter-dimensional monsters, his mentor's head gets bitten off, he gets framed for the murder and is sent to a mental institution, he gets sent BACK to the house, he gets attacked AGAIN, his mentor returns and tries to kill him and his new friends, his love interest brings the monsters back, he almost gets eaten, he ends up bald and slimy, a tentacle pops out of his forehead, he eats his psychiatrists' brain, his love interest bites the tentacle off, and he gets eaten by his mentor, who is now a giant slimy monster. You feel like you should be squicked, but instead you just want to wrap him in a fleece blanket and give him a juice box. Maybe it's because he wears a giant fluffy sweater.
  • Rosemary from Rosemary's Baby. Pretty much everyone around her is manipulating her into giving birth to the fucking Antichrist. This includes her very self-absorbed husband Guy, who agrees to help them arrange it so that she's raped by Satan in exchange for a boost to his acting career. Then the pregnancy is terribly painful and makes her very sick and malnourished, and her neighbors, her husband, and her doctor all assure her that it's perfectly normal and will stop soon... And do their very best to cut her off from anyone who might tell her otherwise. Adding to both the Woobiedom (and the frustration) is the fact that Rosemary actually does know that something's wrong for most of her pregnancy, but is too meek and unsure of herself to outright stand up to Guy or the others. And she's so teeny and sweet and nice...
  • Specialist Eldridge from The Hurt Locker. First, he has two watch his mentor get blown up, and live with the knowledge that if he'd acted more quickly, he could have saved him. Then, he has to watch as the therapist who's helping him get over the the above trauma gets blown up as well. And then his mentor's Jerkass Blood Knight replacement gets him kidnapped by insurgents, and accidentally shoots him whole trying to rescue him.
  • Remember Disney's The Sword in the Stone? Remember when Merlin turns himself and Wart into squirrels, and they are chased by real-life squirrels who have a crush on them?! Remember the reactions of the real squirrels when Merlin changes them back to humans, especially the tearful younger squirrel who chases Wart?!? Yeah, woobies.
    • Wart has his moments, too, especially when Kay disparages him and Sir Ector punishes him unfairly.
  • In the movie version of 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.
  • Wybie, the Other Father, and the Other Wybie from the Film of the Book Coraline.
  • Tom Bardo from Stuck. The poor guy has lost his job, become homeless, and spends most of the film either stuck in the broken window of the car that hit him, or crawling around in agony. And no, none of these are spoilers - it's all in the trailer.
    • The fact that he's played by Stephen Rea, with his hangdog face and big sad eyes, also helps.
  • From The Godfather: Fredo. Goddamn. Corleone. How could you not pity the guy?
  • Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon. An outcast in his village, even his dad thinks he's a failure, he thinks the only way anyone will respect him is if he kills a dragon, and at the end, even after he's gotten all the respect, love, and friendship he'd wanted for the whole movie. He loses his left leg saving pretty much his entire tribe and a whole lot of dragons from a massive Green Death dragon.
  • Mike Waters from My Own Private Idaho is a gay narcoleptic prostitute whose father is also his brother looking for his mother. He doesn't find her. He goes all the way to Italy and finds out she's just left. For much of the movie the only person looking out for him is his friend Scott (a rich guy who's just being a prostitute for fun) who he is also in love with, possibly in an unrequited sense . His narcolepsy means that often he collapses just about anywhere, and falls asleep; Scott is there to pick him up until Scott decides to go back to his respectable family and get married, essentially abandoning Mike to his fate, literally leaving him by the side of the road even though he KNOWS Mike loves him. The film ends with Mike falling asleep on a road in the middle of nowhere, all alone. Some people come along and steal his bag and shoes. Also he's played by the incredibly woobietastic River Phoenix. Seeing him cry will KILL you.
  • George Falconer from A Single Man - whose partner of 16 years dies and he can't openly show his grief cause it's the 60s and all.
  • Maurice and Clive, from E.M Forster's Maurice. At least in the book version, which detailed how confused and alone they felt in regards to being gay. However, Clive turns into a bit of a Jerkass so you don't feel too sorry for him forever.
  • The eponymous Elephant Man. He's a real life woobie too.
  • Rabbit in 8 Mile.
  • Lilya in Lilya Forever.
  • The three main characters in The Magdalen Sisters.
  • Alex in Irreversible.
  • The main character in A Handful of Dust.
  • Martin in Damage.
  • Anne Parillaud's Nikita, (in the original La Femme Nikita).
  • Harold from The Getaway (though the comical way that his situation is handled mean he could arguably qualify as Butt Monkey.
  • Diane from The Vanishing
  • Robbie Turner - and arguably Cecilia Tallis - from Atonement
  • Blanche Hudson from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? although the Twist Ending makes her Woobie status more questionable
  • The widow played by Irene Pappas in Zorba the Greek.
  • Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Although particularly woobie-ish in the Disney adaptation (if you didn't want to huggle the man after being mocked and tortured after the Feast of Fools, you have no heart), he is quite the Woobie in the original novel. Not including the Festival of Fools torture scene, the way that Esmeralda treats Quasimodo after he saves her life is enough to make most any reader give that poor man a hug. Film adaptations following The Hunchback of Notre Dame usually have at least one Woobie moment for Quasimodo as well.
  • A little earlier in Disney Canon was of course The Beast from Beauty and The Beast. At first, he's hot-tempered, nasty and really unkind, but then you start to take pity on him, especially when he starts to like Belle. This of course contrasts with Jerkass suitor Gaston, who is virtually impossible to have sympathy on. The Beast is even more of a woobie in the musical adaptation of the Disney film, particularly during his "woobie song" "If I Can't Love Her". Plus, being that fuzzy, he's probably not all that terrible to hug.
    • Adding to that is the fact that he willingly lets Belle leave and expects her to never come back, even though it means he'll never turn back to normal and never see the only woman he ever loved again. This is a step up from the fairy tale, when the Beast just gives Bella a three day limit.
  • Rodan from the Godzilla film series.
  • Some of Gerard Butler's character from the more recent films are this to SOME extent, even if just a little. ie: Gamer, P.S. I love you, The Ugly Truth, Law Abiding Citizen, heck even Stoick from How to Train Your Dragon was slightly woobie-ish when you try to see it from HIS point of view
    • Not forgetting the Phantom of the Opera, whose murderous and possessive streak can be explained in that he was paraded as a freak show when he was a kid, and almost everyone has denied him genuine love. He even had a woobie song (which was ironically cut from the film) called "No One Would Listen". Awww.
  • Winslow Leach in Phantom of the Paradise. Sweet and woefully naïve, not only is his precious cantata stolen, but he's also beaten up, framed and sent to life imprisonment, has his teeth extracted, his face mangled by a record press, signs away his soul unwittingly, endures his cantata being mangled by a mediocre pop band, is rejected by his love and loses her to his nemesis, and unsuccessfully tries to kill himself. Then he dies, sacrificing himself for his love.
  • Amazingly, Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13 th is often seen as one. The kid was born disfigured, drowned by bullies, watched his mother killed, and just wants to be left alone. True, he does this by killing anybody who disturbs him, but 90% of Friday the 13th fanfiction involves him being reformed by somebody's Mary Sue.
    • Played up intentionally in Freddy vs. Jason. Amazingly, it works. You just want to give the big guy a huge when you see what Freddy does to him.
  • In the short film Partly Cloudly, both the cloud and stork deserve hugs.
  • Marky from Harry Brown is pretty close to being The Woobie. While he is admittedly a bit of a dick, it seems to be mostly an attempt to blend in with the other chavs, who are far more inclined to savagery than he seems to be. Considering that he gets sexually abused by his uncle, kidnapped and tortured by Harry and then used as bait by Harry before getting shot in the head by one of his own mates, it's hard not to feel at least a little bit sorry for him.
  • Cillian Murphy's character from Inception, big time. You will cry when you see him crying over his dying father's accepting last words in Dream Level Three, which is all he ever really wanted. However, since it's quite literally All Just a Dream, he may or may not have gotten that acceptance after all and it may have only been a projection of what he wished his father's final words have been. Poor guy...
    • Dom Cobb. I mean, holy crap look at what that poor guy went through. His wife committed suicide because he incepted her into believing the world wasn't real and they needed to wake up, only she was so insane she ended up framing him for murder so he would die with her so they could be together, and thus he has to flee the country and leave his kids behind. Plus the fact that the closest thing the movie has to a real villain is his projection of his own guilt in the form of his wife constantly sabotaging his missions makes it even worse.
  • The two leads from Billy Wilder's The Apartment, but most especially C.C. Baxter. He's the sweetest, most good-natured guy you've ever seen (played by Jack Lemmon, natch), and he spends 120 minutes getting kicked around by nearly everyone, but is always there to clean up, put things in order, and even cover up for them when the neighbors complain. The last five minutes or so might make this a case of Earn Your Happy Ending, but for the previous 120 minutes it's a Crapsack World and you mostly just want to give the poor guy a hug. Also sorely in need of a hug is Fran Kubelik, the heroine, who spends half the film wandering around with tears in her eyes and even attempts suicide.
  • Terri, who comes across as both cute and sad in her desperation for what essentially amounts to friendship and/or love, from Hellraiser III Hell On Earth.
  • Rosencrantz from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He goes throughout the movie totally confused as to what the heck is going on. He is being manipulated by forces he cannot understand and keeps having his inventions and scientific breakthroughts torn down by the only person who cares for him. He doesn't do anything wrong and yet his fate is already sealed. This troper couldn't watch the scene where Guildenstern makes him cry without wanting to give Rosencrantz a big hug. Yes, ladies and gentleman, Gary Oldman, is playing a woobie, and oh so well.
  • Rudy from Horton Hears a Who!. It's really must suck being stuck to a Jerkass mother.
  • Lilly from Alpha and Omega definately qualifies as a woobie.
  • Tron and Quorra in Tron: Legacy. Tron got rectified into becoming The Dragon for Big Bad Clu. Quorra is the last of her kind, an breed of emergent AIs who were deemed "imperfect" by Clu and dealt with. Kevin Flynn rescued her from one of Clu's extermination squads.
    • Heck, Kevin Flynn too. All he wanted to do was help improve/make a better world, but ends up trapped in it for what was essentially thousands of years, while his old partner-program Clu took over and majestically buggered up Flynn's work. To make it even worse, he thought TRON died helping him escape, and was stuck with the knowledge that he'd probably never see his son again.
  • Mr. Tumnus in the movie of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. He was plenty of one in the book, but the movie really ramps it up with James McAvoy's performance. There's also the matter of an added scene in which he meets Edmund in the White Witch's prison and it's made rather clear that he's being starved and beaten. Even then, his only concern is that Lucy is safe. Oh, and when the Witch gleefully tells him he's only there because Edmund ratted him out, the look on his face is heartbreaking.
    • Even more so considering the Witch technically lies; Edmund had no idea he was turning Tumnus in, only mentioning his name as a side comment when exlpaining how he arrived in Narnia.
  • George VI in The King's Speech. As he tells Lionel after the death of George V; the reason he stammers is because of an abusive nanny, an teasing older brother who was egged on by his father, the brother that he was closest to died young, and was forced to wear painful splints to treat his knock knees.
  • Micky in The Fighter. He's the family's unfavorite, his mother mismanages his boxing career (even nearly getting him killed so his family can get paid), his crackhead brother is usually getting him into trouble, his ex-wife treats him like a failure and when he becomes happy by finding a new girlfriend, his family tries to take that away from him. This guy seriously needs a hug.
  • Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald) in No Country for Old Men. That Anton Chigurh was able to just kill her like that shows how much of a Complete Monster he really is.
  • Poor little Danny from Zathura.
  • Alex Russo, in the first half of the Wizards of Waverly Place movie. Though she's usually a Jerkass throughout most of the series, it's easy to relate to her situation-she just wanted to go to a party, and just when it looks like she's about to finally make her mother change her mind, Theresa discovers Alex's plan, and fed up with her refusal to give up, grounds her for two months, which leads Alex to cast a spell that accidentally threatens her family's existence. The fact that Alex wanted to go to that party so badly but couldn't make amends does make you feel sorry for her. At the end of the movie after everything is resolved, she finally agrees to let Alex go for a little while, but Alex, having realized how important her family is, decides to stick with them, and the movie ends with the five family members together.
  • Baby Doll from Sucker Punch. Just watch the first five minutes of the movie. It Got Worse and in the ending she finally reach "enlightenment in the creepiest way possible. Lobotomized!
  • Seita and his little sister Setsuko, in the animated film Grave of the Fireflies. The two young children, living in WWII Japan, lose their father to battle and their mother to the Kobe firebombings. Their aunt takes them in until, unable to scrounge enough food to feed them and her own children, she turns them out, and their problems really begin. Nothing good befalls those poor kids until after they both starve to death. Perhaps the worst aspect is that it's based on real events; the movie is an adaptation of a semi-autobiographical novel by Akiyuki Nosaka.
  • Dr. Loomis from the Halloween series. Never mind that he is one of the few characters who doesn't get horribly murdered, does anything good ever happen to him? The final scene in Halloween 4 cements his woobie status, making everyone watching the film want to wrap him in a big hug and tell him everything's going to be ok.
  • Su-in from Dead Friend. Poor, poor Su-in.
  • Po in Kung Fu Panda starts off a bit as a Butt Monkey in the first movie, but later in the movie 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. Sure, he gets to meet his idols, The Furious Five, but Shifu and them treat him awfully just about the entire movie. 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.
  • "Heroin" Bob from SLC Punk!. Although he doesn't get as much attention in the movie as Stevo, his story unfolds piece by piece until the end. When he and Stevo were kids, they were both geeks, getting picked on. However, while Stevo was from a fairly normal family, Bob had no mom and was living with his alchoholic, insane father. Later, he tries to visit his father for his birthday and brings him a present, but the old man chases him out with a gun, after not recognising his own son. After Bob falls in love with Trish, he admits to Stevo that he actually feels happy with her and he's willing to give the city they both hated for so long another chance. Finally, in the end he spills his guts to Stevo, saying he wants to marry Trish and revealing that all this time he's had doubts whether he's ever been a good son and if he hadn't let his father down. And to top it all, he dies the next morning. If that doesn't make you tear up and want to hug the guy, nothing will.
  • In the first Christopher Reeve Superman film, Reeve manages to create a moving Woobie moment. It's when Clark Kent is at the Daily Planet elevators, having just been brushed off by Lois Lane, ignored by nearly everyone and treated rudely the one person who does notice him. At that moment, Clark is a lonely nerd who can't get seem to get a break. All the more powerful when you know that Lois' helicopter is about to crash and Clark is about to have his Crowning Moment of Awesome as the Man of Steel because of it.
  • Hank McCoy from X-Men: First Class, he not only gets "outed" as being a mutant in the most awkward way possible in front of his dad, he loses said dad in a raid on the CIA (something that mind you never gets brought up, ever!), gets teased and disrespected by his fellow mutants even when his scientific inventions help them improve their powers, loses his potential love interest when he can't accept her for her true appearance, and then accidentally advances his mutation and makes it impossible to hide while trying to cure it!
  • Todd in Dead Poets Society could count -- his parents prefer his older brother to him, he doesn't have the same confidence or self-assuredness that most of his friends seem to, and his best friend kills himself toward the end of the movie.. It helps that he's perpetually cute and vulnerable-looking. The scene when he's showing Neil the desk set that his parents gave him for his birthday two years in a row, probably because they just didn't care enough to give it more thought, cements both Todd's woobie status and Neil's as the best friend he could possibly have. Fortunately, he gets a good deal more confident and sure of himself by the end.
    • Flipside of this being that as Todd becomes less of a woobie, Niel becomes more of one due to his relationship with his dad until the aformentioned suicide.
  • Requiem for a Dream. Seriously, try to watch the final scene without wanting to give every character a big squishy hug.
  • Lawrence Talbot, aka Universal Studios' The Wolf Man, is an early example. Poor guy gets bitten by a monster, catches The Virus, involuntarily kills a bunch of people, and gets beaten to death by his own father. And in the sequels, he escapes from the grave, learns he can't stay dead, kills his own Love Interest in a moon-mad rage, and spends most of the rest of the series as a fugitive from the law and/or the insane asylum, vainly seeking the means to commit suicide and/or destroy the wolf within. Definitely a guy in need of a hug.
  • Loki from Thor. Sure, he's the villain and we're supposed to be rooting against him, but the fact that he constantly looks like he's about to cry and has spent his whole life trying to get out of the shadow of his big ( adoptive) brother and please his father doesn't help things.
  • Alistair the llama from Open Season 3 is totally one of these.
  • Tennessee from the live-action version of The Country Bears really seems to fit this trope, considering how depressed he is in the movie.
  • Agatha from Minority Report. She was born to a heroin addict, and had the gift of precognition- specifically, she had visions of murders before they happened. Pretty bad, right? Well, then the government get wind of this, do all sorts of unmentioned -but implied to be nasty- experiments to her, and the precrime ystem is set up- meaning that she is forced to stay in a drugged stupor, wired to a machine having endless visions of murders so that the cops can use her premonitions to prevent crime. And when her mother tries to save Agatha from this? The head of precrime has her murdered to ensure Agatha stays a Forsaken Child, which thanks to her gift, means that she has to witness her mother's death and watch as everyone igores it. When she's kidnapped/rescued from the facility, she's been left so ustable that she can barely tell the difference between the present and her precognitions.
  • Who doesn't want to hug Kirk when he is forced to blow up the Enterprise in The Search for Spock? Or thought he was going to die in The Final Frontier?
    • Or, for that matter, when he sees the Enterprise for the first time in The Motion Picture. The man's face just lights up.
      • Why didn't you hug him when you could, Scotty?
  • Both of the villains in The World Is Not Enough qualify to an extent. Renard the Anarchist is a brutal terrorist, yes, but he's also in the process of dying a horrible death (a bullet slowly migrating through his brain; he's already lost all sensation of both pleasure and pain), and he's completely an utterly in love. His scenes with his significant other are among the closest this series gets to being totally heartwarming. His partner in crime, and the aforementioned significant other, Elektra King, meanwhile, was kidnapped by terrorists as a teenager (with there almost certainly being a sexual aspect to her captivity) to extort money from her oil-baron father. You know what he does? He leaves her there. You know who told him to leave her there? The frigging Big Good. Fortunately for her, Renard was one of the terrorists, they fell in love, and he helped her escape. It's thus easy to see why they plan to nuke Istanbul, cutting off the main center of the petroleum trade between East and West, allowing Renard to go out with a bang and Elektra to corner the oil market as a final post-mortem (Renard saw to that earlier) one-finger salute to Daddy Dearest. Unfortunately, they still have to die; they are plotting to kill millions, after all.
  • Jim Prideaux, in the eyes of the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy fandom. Being shot in the back, captured, and tortured would be quite bad enough, but the true extent of his woobiness falls into place at the end of the movie. The Mole turns out to be Jim's best friend, former partner, and possible ex-boyfriend. And Jim kills him.
    • And Peter Guillam, at least in the movie. When Smiley tells him to clean up any loose end of his own that might get him in trouble, Guillam goes home and breaks up with his boyfriend - because that was still illegal in mid-70's Britain. Watching Guillam break down in tears as the man leaves is just heartbreaking. The whole scene serves little purpose beyond reinforcing a theme: be a secret agent, and your life will be depressing as hell.
  • Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi: Surinder
  • Martyrs: Both Lucie and Anna. Initially, our sympathies are with the tramautised Lucie, whose suffering we can understand as having occurred in the past and leading to her actions. The audience is then forced to experience the gruelling torture of Anna so vicariously as to want to break her free and give her the biggest hug imaginable.
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