Kana Hanazawa

Yuko Tani lies in a bed and is talked about. That is the whole of Kana Hanazawa's part in Godzilla: The Planet Eater (2018), and it is not much less than her part in Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle (2018), where she plays the pilot the film most wants us to worry about and is handed a few lines and a cockpit before the worrying is supposed to start. We were asked to fear for Yuko and found we could not, and the fault was not hers; there was nothing on the page to fear for yet. Two films into a trilogy, the actress with the most recognisable voice in the cast had barely been allowed to use it.

That voice is high, warm and slightly breathy, and Japanese animation has spent two decades casting it as the gentle girl, the sweet one, the one the boys are careful around. Hanazawa came to it from live-action variety programmes as a small child and made her voice debut at 14, as Holly in Last Exile (2003). Her lead in Zegapain (2006) drew complaints that the delivery was flat, and they led to a spell of self-doubt. Then came the run that made her: Nadeko Sengoku in Bakemonogatari (2009), Mayuri Shiina in Steins;Gate (2011) and a string of other leading girls in between, all while she was still at university. She graduated in 2011 and has scarcely stopped since, adding a singing career from 2012.

The interesting thing about the voice is what it does when it is not being sweet. In Happy Sugar Life, as Satou Matsuzaka, and in Jujutsu Kaisen 0 (2021), as Rika Orimoto, the softness gives way to something intense and distorted, and the shift only works because the sweetness came first. Of Rika she has said she "focused on how uncomfortable and eerie she'd feel in that body", which is the right way round: the body first, the noise after. The complaint against her, and it is a fair one, is that the sweet register turns up so often across so many series that one performance blurs into the next. Being everywhere has a cost, and the cost is that people stop hearing you.

Makoto Shinkai has used her three times, as Yukari Yukino in The Garden of Words (2013), as a teacher in Your Name. (2016) and as Tsubame Iwato in Suzume (2022), and in our review of Suzume the chair and the skies took the notice and she did not. Mitsuri Kanroji in Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba (2019) keeps her in front of a large audience. None of the films we have reviewed is the place to find out what she can do; for that you will need a series, and preferably one that lets her get out of bed.