Maaya Sakamoto

Maaya Sakamoto has been working since she was a child, voicing Chifuru in Little Twins in 1992, and she was still a teenager when The Vision of Escaflowne made her name in 1996. Hitomi Kanzaki is an ordinary schoolgirl dropped into a war, and the performance set a template Sakamoto has spent thirty years complicating: the girl who sounds normal, inside a story that is not.

She is a singer as well as an actor and the voice carries it, a clean unforced middle register that never strains to be heard. What she does with it is unusually wide. She is Haruhi in Ouran High School Host Club, a girl who cannot be bothered with the gender everyone assigns her, played completely deadpan. She is Ciel Phantomhive in Black Butler, a boy aristocrat with a very cold voice. She is Kiss-shot across the Monogatari series and its films, a centuries-old vampire who has to be a small child and an ancient predator inside the same sentence. She is Mari in the last three Evangelion films, brought in to be the one character in that series who appears to be enjoying herself.

The Ghost in the Shell credits are a career in miniature. In the 1995 film she is a girl, credited only as Kusanagi Girl; two decades on she is Motoko Kusanagi herself, in the Arise films and the 2015 feature. Elsewhere she is Aerith in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Eto in Tokyo Ghoul, Merlin in The Seven Deadly Sins, the Administrator in Sword Art Online, Echidna in Re:Zero, and the narrator of Made in Abyss, a job that turns out to be the quietly devastating thing in it. She works constantly and rarely repeats herself.