This one gets you in the first act and never gives the ground back. Remi is happy, Barberin comes home from the city, and in the space of one conversation she learns she was never theirs and is nearly handed off to a slave trader. Nippon Animation adapts Hector Malot's Sans Famille here with Remi as a girl, which turns Vitalis taking her into his travelling troupe into something more fragile than the old boy-and-his-dog version, and the show knows it. The kindness in it is what does the damage. Vitalis hearing her sing and deciding she is worth keeping lands harder than any of the cruelty, because you already know what road performers walk and what winter does to them. Twenty-three episodes, no fat, and it earns every tear it takes from you.

Remi, a cheerful and kindhearted girl, lives with her mother in a country town in France. Her world shatters when her father comes home after years of work in a city and reveals that she is not their real daughter. Remi comes close to being sold to a cruel slave trader, but Vitalis, a traveling entertainer, comes to her aid. Recognizing her gift for singing, he takes her into his troupe, and she sets out on the road with him and his performing animals: the monkey Georicoule and the dogs Capi, Dolce and Zelbino. In one town she meets a woman and her son, Arthur, and the three grow close, though Remi has no idea who they really are. Life on the road brings hardship after hardship in this adventure drama adapted from Hector Malot's novel Sans Famille.