Katsuji Mori
Katsuji Mori is an actor, born 1945.
If you watched Japanese television animation between the late 1960s and about 1990, you heard Katsuji Mori. He was born in Tokyo in 1945 and worked under the stage name Setsuya Tanaka before settling on his own, and the parts that made him are the ones a whole generation of Japanese viewers can still name: Go Mifune in Mach GoGoGo, Joe Shimamura in Cyborg 009, Jouji Minami in Tekkaman, and above all Ken the Eagle, the leader of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman.
His register is the earnest young hero, and specifically the version who carries an unreasonable amount of responsibility without ever complaining about it. Ken Washio is the template. What makes the later career interesting is that anime grew up and Mori grew with it, so the same clean, formal voice starts arriving on characters who are compromised. Garma Zabi in Mobile Suit Gundam is a charming aristocrat on the wrong side of a war. Wolfgang Mittermeyer in Legend of the Galactic Heroes is a decent commander inside a system with no use for decency. Nephrite in Sailor Moon is a villain played entirely straight.
The list keeps going into places you would not predict: Robespierre in The Rose of Versailles, Shu in Fist of the North Star, Polnareff in the 1993 JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, a role in the atomic-bomb drama Barefoot Gen, Dr. Okido in Pokemon Origins, a supporting adult in FLCL. Sixty-six credits are collected here, running from 1969 to the 2020s, and he was still taking parts in new series in the 2020s.
Movies (21)
- Ninja Scroll (1993)
- Detective Conan: Magician of the Silver Sky (2004)
- Saint Seiya: Legend of Crimson Youth (1988)
- Saint Seiya: Warriors of the Final Holy Battle (1989)
- Mobile Suit Gundam I (1981)
- Barefoot Gen (1983)
- Twilight of the Cockroaches (1987)
- Bagi, the Monster of Mighty Nature (1984)
- Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Overture to a New War (1993)
- Dirty Pair: Project Eden (1986)
- Odin: Starlight Mutiny (1985)
- Twelve Months (1980)
- Legend of the Galactic Heroes: My Conquest Is the Sea of Stars (1988)
- Aim for the Ace! The Movie (1979)
- Mobile Suit SD Gundam (1988)
- Samurai Gold (1988)
- Yuki (1981)
- Future War 198X (1982)
- Kiddy Grade II: Maelstrom (2007)
- Bokura Mangaka: Tokiwa-sou Monogatari (1981)
- Inferious Interplanetary War Chronicle - Condition Green (1991)
TV (43)
- Sailor Moon (1992)
- Fist of the North Star (1984)
- Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer (2022)
- The Demon Sword Master of Excalibur Academy (2023)
- Mobile Suit Gundam (1979)
- Legend of the Galactic Heroes (1988)
- Real Drive (2008)
- FLCL (2000)
- Handyman Saitou in Another World (2023)
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (1993)
- Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (1972)
- The Law of Ueki (2005)
- Dokaben (1976)
- Decision (1971)
- X-Bomber (1980)
- Astro Boy (1980)
- Tales of Symphonia: The Animation (2007)
- Requiem from the Darkness (2003)
- Unlimited Psychic Squad (2013)
- The Rose of Versailles (1979)
- Stop!! Hibari-kun! (1983)
- Armored Fleet Dairugger XV (1982)
- Hello! Sandybell (1981)
- Charge! Men's Private School (1988)
- Night Raid 1931 (2010)
- J9 Series (1981)
- Pokémon Origins (2013)
- Tatakae!! Ramenman (1988)
- Glass Mask (1984)
- Cutie Honey (1973)
Where to start with Katsuji Mori
Science Ninja Team Gatchaman is the historical starting point and still the clearest demonstration of what Mori does: Ken the Eagle is played with a straightness a modern cast would undercut, and the show is better for it. If 1972 television animation is a hard sell, go instead to Mobile Suit Gundam, where Garma Zabi gets a short arc with more shading than the format usually allows.
The best of the later work is Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Mittermeyer is a long, patient role across an enormous series, and Mori plays him as a professional rather than a hero, which is the whole argument of the show. The Rose of Versailles hands him Robespierre, a genuinely strange piece of casting that works.
For features, Barefoot Gen and Ninja Scroll are the two to see, at opposite ends of what animation was being asked to do across the 1980s and 1990s. Sailor Moon and Fist of the North Star are the fun ones, and FLCL is where he turns up in something a great deal weirder.