Tessyo Genda

Tessyo Genda is an actor, born 1948.

Genda debuted under his own name, Mitsuo Yokoi, and had a ballet background substantial enough that colleagues called him Pirouette Genda, which is an unlikely origin story for a voice mostly used for things the size of buildings. By September 2007 he had 234 credited roles behind him. He has not slowed down since, and he narrates as much as he acts.

The speciality is authority with weight behind it. When a Japanese production needs something ancient, enormous and out of patience, it hires this voice: Kurama, the nine-tailed fox sealed inside the hero of Naruto, snarling at a boy from inside the boy's own body; Kaido in One Piece; Metal Knight in One-Punch Man; Janemba in the Dragon Ball films. He is a bass instrument, and directors use him roughly the way a score uses low brass.

What keeps that from becoming a monotone is that he can play the register completely straight. Director Nakamura in Ghost in the Shell is a bureaucrat rather than a monster, and Genda gives him the flat officiousness of a man who signs forms for a living. Oculus in Death Parade, Rudersdorf in Saga of Tanya the Evil, Nemo's father in a Little Nemo film, a small part in Akira: the same voice doing very different jobs. He is employed by 81 Produce and has now been working continuously for longer than most of the franchises he appears in have existed.

Movies (127)

TV (134)

Where to start with Tessyo Genda

Start with Naruto Shippūden for the definitive Genda role. Kurama is a voice arriving from underneath the protagonist, and the show uses it for menace long before it uses it for anything warmer. Naruto has the earlier and angrier version of the same performance.

One Piece gives him Kaido, the same instrument aimed at a much larger target, and One-Punch Man is the comic inversion, since Metal Knight is a booming voice attached to a man who never turns up in person.

For the films, Akira and Ghost in the Shell are essential viewing regardless, and his parts in them are small and worth listening for precisely because he is not doing the monster voice. Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn is the demon register at full volume.

Two lesser-known ones: Death Parade uses him as a calm and unreadable authority figure, and Kaiju No. 8 is the recent showcase, a commander written for exactly this voice.

The films where the voice does the work

Genda's register is deep enough that directors cast him when they want weight rather than character. Akira and Ghost in the Shell are the two canonical anime features he anchors, and Beautiful Dreamer is the Mamoru Oshii oddity that people still argue about forty years later.

The long-running shonen series

Five decades of work in the shows that run for hundreds of episodes. He tends to be cast as the enormous authority figure or the thing everyone else is running from, and One-Punch Man uses that expectation as the joke.

The roles built entirely around size

Yujiro Hanma in Baki is the purest version of what he does: a character whose whole premise is physical impossibility, played by a voice that makes it sound plausible. Berserk is the darkest thing on this list and the one worth watching first.

Genres Tessyo Genda works in

More about Tessyo Genda

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