Ryunosuke Kamiki

Ryunosuke Kamiki holds his jaw tight and looks as though surviving has become an inconvenience. As Koichi Shikishima in Godzilla Minus One (2023), he makes a man’s guilt visible before the script asks him to explain it. We were moved by that fixed stare: he seems unable to accept that being alive might be something other than a failure. It is persuasive acting, and Takashi Yamazaki gets less from him when he asks for more noise.

His adult dramatic leads followed a childhood spent working in both animation and live action. He voiced Boh in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001), then took his first live-action lead in The Great Yokai War (2005). The Kirishima Thing (2012) marked a breakthrough, but animation remained a substantial part of his work. In Your Name. (2016), he supplied the voice of the lead character Taki Tachibana.

In Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume (2022), he is allowed to be easier company. Kamiki voices Tomoya Serizawa, Souta’s friend with the open-top car, among the people whose kindness makes the journey worth following. We rate those encounters above the thin romance, and his part belongs to that welcome company. There is room here for an actor to be companionable without being asked to explain everybody’s feelings.

Yamazaki gives him harder work in Godzilla Minus One, where the trouble comes when private distress has to become another shouted declaration. Kamiki has already shown us how thoroughly Shikishima has condemned himself, so the extra emphasis feels unnecessary. Minami Hamabe gives him a stubborn Noriko to play against, while Sakura Ando’s Sumiko shows how much can be expressed by feeding a baby without softening a furious face. Start with Kamiki facing the monster, but allow for a script that keeps turning up the volume after he has made himself understood.