Kana Hanazawa

Kana Hanazawa is an actor, born 1989.

Kana Hanazawa has been working in anime since 2003, and the sheer volume is part of the story. She is one of a small group of voice actors whose casting tells you something about a character before a line is spoken. She won the Seiyu Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2015 and took the Newtype prize for Best Voice Actress three times, in 2015, 2017 and 2018. She also records as a singer, which is audible in how precisely she controls the top of her range.

The signature Hanazawa performance is a soft, high, slightly breathy voice attached to someone considerably more dangerous or more damaged than that voice suggests. Rize in Tokyo Ghoul and Seryu in Akame ga Kill! are the blunt versions of the trick. Mayuri in Steins;Gate is the artful one, a character whose relentless sweetness becomes the emotional stake of the entire series, and it only works because Hanazawa never plays her as stupid.

She is just as reliable when the material has no genre armour at all. Yukari Yukino in The Garden of Words is a quiet adult performance carried almost entirely on hesitation, and small roles in Your Name, Weathering with You and Suzume have made her a fixture of Makoto Shinkai's films. Satomi in Parasyte is the ordinary human in a horror series, which is harder to play than the monsters. The current audience knows her as Mitsuri Kanroji in Demon Slayer and Rin Shinonome in Kaiju No. 8, so she is now voicing headline characters in two of the largest franchises running.

Movies (86)

Where to start with Kana Hanazawa

The place to begin is Steins;Gate, and not for the time-travel plot. Her Mayuri is why the back half of that series lands, and it is the clearest demonstration of what she does with a voice that sounds harmless.

The Garden of Words next, because it runs 46 minutes and contains her most adult performance, built out of pauses and withheld information. Then Tokyo Ghoul for the opposite extreme, where the same sweetness is used as a weapon.

For current work, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba gives her a character made almost entirely of enthusiasm, and Kaiju No. 8 lets her play cold competence instead. Parasyte -the maxim- is the underrated one: she is the normal person in a body-horror series, and she makes normality interesting. Jujutsu Kaisen 0 is the short, loud option if you want a single film.

The leading roles

The performances that built her reputation, mostly from the early 2010s. Steins;Gate is the one most often cited because it asks for two entirely different registers from the same character. Psycho-Pass gives her a proper lead across multiple seasons of a genuinely good series.

The Makoto Shinkai films

She has appeared in every Makoto Shinkai feature since The Garden of Words, which is an unusually consistent working relationship for a voice actor. These are the films with by far the widest audience of anything she has done, and Your Name remains one of the highest-grossing anime films ever made.

The current mainstream anime

If you have watched anything popular in the last decade she is probably somewhere in it. Demon Slayer and Kaiju No. 8 are the current mass-audience shows, and Tokyo Ghoul is the earlier one that travelled furthest outside Japan.

Genres Kana Hanazawa works in

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