Ikue Otani

Ikue Otani was born in Tokyo in 1965, grew up in Niigata, and has spent her career at Mausu Promotion voicing some of the most recognised characters in Japanese animation. She is in My Neighbor Totoro in 1988 doing additional voices, on Detective Conan from 1996 as Mitsuhiko Tsuburaya, in Pokemon from 1997 as Pikachu, in One Piece from 1999 as Tony Tony Chopper, and in Naruto from 2002 as Konohamaru Sarutobi.

The Pikachu job is the one worth thinking about, because it is much harder than it looks. The character has a vocabulary of one word. Otani has built decades of performance out of four syllables and the placement of a rising inflection, and audiences in every country read fear, sulking, affection and outrage off it without subtitles. Give a comparable actor a paragraph of dialogue and they can hide behind the writing. She has no writing to hide behind.

Range, in her case, means something specific: she plays boys as readily as girls, animals as readily as people, and frequently several parts in one production. Chopper is a reindeer with a child's voice and a doctor's vocabulary, Konohamaru is a small boy with an ego, Mitsuhiko is a schoolchild who talks like a textbook. Her other credits run through Zatch Bell, Corpse Party, Smile PreCure, Persona 5 and Cookie Run: Kingdom, and back into film with Mary and the Witch's Flower and Pokemon Detective Pikachu.