Megumi Hayashibara

Megumi Hayashibara has been the most recognisable female voice in anime since the early 1990s, and she runs her own agency, Woodpark Office, rather than sitting inside somebody else's. She is also a singer, a lyricist and a radio host, and the music is not a sideline: she performed opening and ending themes for both the 2001 and 2021 adaptations of Shaman King, where she also voiced Anna Kyoyama.

The range is the argument. Rei Ayanami in Neon Genesis Evangelion is a performance built by subtraction, almost no inflection, almost no volume, a character defined by what the actress declines to add. In the same handful of years she was Lina Inverse in the Slayers films, Faye Valentine in Cowboy Bebop, Musashi in Pokemon, Haruko in FLCL and the female Ranma in Ranma one-half, all of them fast, loud and comic. Very few performers own both ends of that.

She has also carried Rei from the 1995 series through The End of Evangelion and every Rebuild film to Thrice Upon a Time in 2021, which is a quarter of a century inside one character. Elsewhere the credits are a tour of the medium's better films: Paprika, Pom Poko, Ai Haibara in Detective Conan, a minor part billed as Woman in Blue in Castle in the Sky from 1986, which is the earliest thing here.