Anna Yamada

Anna Yamada often plays the young woman watching while violence or confusion gathers around her. She can convey strength without overt dramatics, and we value the restraint. The risk is that casting directors keep asking her to be the serious witness and give her too little to initiate. A character can spend a whole film seeing clearly and still deserve something more to do.

Liverleaf (2018), her first starring film, put her in a violent revenge story. The gentler coming-of-age film Little Love Song (2019) widened her profile; she later played Rin in Mountain Woman (2023). Playing Asirpa in Golden Kamuy (2024) brought wider recognition and showed her ability to anchor an ensemble.

In Yasuhiro Aoki’s ChaO (2025), the task changes: Yamada has to help make an animated courtship convincing. She voices Chao opposite Ōji Suzuka’s Stephan, in a film whose peculiar designs and comic energy do much of the work. She has described trying onomatopoeia to match Chao’s movements and make the character charming. That attention to individual sounds is a useful detail about her approach, though it cannot tell us what the couple find in each other.

We were frustrated by ChaO because its comic situations kept arriving before the relationship had become persuasive. We wanted longer with the pair, without another burst of activity interrupting the courtship. The screenplay develops their attraction too thinly, so we should be careful about treating the resulting weakness as a verdict on either voice performer. The expressive animation earns an evening for enthusiasts, but this is a limited introduction to what Yamada can do when a character has room to develop. We would like her next serious young woman to be allowed to cause some of the trouble.