Megumi Ogata

The adolescent boy is Ogata's speciality, and she has more or less set the terms for how that voice sounds in Japanese animation. Shinji Ikari in Neon Genesis Evangelion is the case everyone cites, and rightly so: the performance is not a pitched-up impression of a teenager but a genuinely uncomfortable one, all held breath and swallowed sentences, and it is a large part of why the character became an argument instead of a mascot. She has now played him across the 1995 series, The End of Evangelion and all four Rebuild films, which is nearly three decades inside the same interior crisis.

The range around that is wider than the Shinji reputation allows. Kurama in Yu Yu Hakusho is calm where Shinji is frantic. Yukito Tsukishiro in Cardcaptor Sakura is warm and unhurried. Add Yuta Okkotsu in Jujutsu Kaisen 0, Itona Horibe in Assassination Classroom, Hanako in Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun, the Danganronpa leads, work in Sailor Moon and Magic Knight Rayearth, and a catalogue of well over a hundred credits.

She sings too, releasing music under the name em:óu. What holds the acting together is a refusal of the cute register that dominates so much of the industry: her boys sound anxious, dry or wounded, often all three at once, and almost never charming. It is a narrow instrument played with unusual precision, and it has kept her near the centre of the medium since the early 1990s.