Shigesato Itoi
Shigesato Itoi is an actor, born 1948.
In Japan, copywriter is closer to a public role than a job title, and Itoi has held it for decades. He writes essays, lyrics and advertising, and he runs the daily website and company Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun as its editor in chief. Outside Japan he is known for something else entirely: he designed Nintendo's Mother games, including the one released in the West as EarthBound, along with a bass fishing game that carries his own name. Those are not among the credits listed here, but they are why most people arrive at his page.
The screen work is a sideline, and a charming one. He voiced Tatsuo Kusakabe in My Neighbor Totoro, which means the calm, faintly distracted father in one of the most loved animated films ever made is the same man who wrote a role-playing game about children fighting a cosmic horror with a baseball bat. He also appears as a professor in the film of Murakami's Norwegian Wood, and in a couple of Japanese comedies from the late 1980s and early 1990s.
There is no acting career here to assess. There is a writer with an unusually good voice who occasionally lends it to other people's films.
Movies (4)
Where to start with Shigesato Itoi
You have almost certainly seen the place to start already: My Neighbor Totoro. Watch it once knowing that the father, the adult who never panics and never patronizes his daughters, is voiced by the man who wrote EarthBound, and the film's particular gentleness suddenly has a signature on it.
Norwegian Wood is the grown-up follow-up: Tran Anh Hung's Murakami adaptation, beautiful and slow, with Itoi in a small role as a professor. Approach it as a mood rather than a plot.
My Soul Is Slashed and Guys Who Never Learn are for people already deep in his work, oddities from a period when Japanese cinema borrowed its personalities from television and print. His games remain the real body of work, and they sit outside this filmography.