Mitsuo Iwata

Mitsuo Iwata is an actor, born 1967.

For a great many people outside Japan, Iwata is a single character: Kaneda. He voiced Shotaro Kaneda in Akira in 1988, and that performance, all swagger and cracked bravado, became one of the most recognisable sounds in animation. Born in Tokorozawa, Saitama in 1967, he has worked as an actor, voice actor and singer, moving from Office Osawa and Across Entertainment to Aoni Production.

The Kaneda register, loud young men with more confidence than sense, carried him a long way: Itsuki in Initial D, Tetsuya in Outlanders, and above all Kintaro Oe in Golden Boy, a role he reportedly prepared for over months until his voice gave out, and which one reviewer said nobody else could have played. It is a performance of pure, exhausting commitment, and it is the one his admirers cite when they call him one of the great seiyuu.

What is more interesting is how the voice aged. The swagger became pomposity, and he turned into a superb comic authority figure: Champa across Dragon Ball Super and Super Dragon Ball Heroes, Zaboera in Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai, the volcanic director Inanami in Shirobako. Then, in the other direction entirely, Kiyotaka Ijichi in Jujutsu Kaisen, a put-upon administrator played quiet and tired, which is about as far from Kaneda as the same throat can get.

He won Best Personality at the seventh Seiyu Awards in 2013, an award that recognises rather more than the voice work alone, which tells you something about how far his working life extends beyond the booth.

Movies (28)

Where to start with Mitsuo Iwata

Akira first, and not only for the obvious reason. Kaneda is a swaggering teenager who spends the film being outmatched, and Iwata plays the bluster as a thin shell over panic, which is what stops the character being insufferable.

Golden Boy is the connoisseur's pick and a completely unhinged vocal performance, the one he wrecked his voice preparing. Follow it with Initial D, where the same youthful energy is dialled down into something more ordinary and more likeable.

For the later comic register, Dragon Ball Super gives him Champa, a preening and gluttonous god, and SHIROBAKO gives him an animation director with a temper, which is funnier than it has any right to be. JUJUTSU KAISEN is the deliberate opposite, all restraint and fatigue. Then Paprika and Dead Leaves for the two strangest films on the list, both worth your time for reasons that have nothing to do with him.

The career-defining roles

Kaneda at nineteen is the performance the whole career sits on, and Golden Boy is the other one people cite, a role he reportedly rehearsed for months until his voice gave out. Both are loud and completely committed.

The modern long-runners

Steady work in the biggest shonen franchises, generally as a supporting adult rather than a hero. Champa in Dragon Ball Super is the funniest of them, and Ijichi in Jujutsu Kaisen is the most put-upon man in the series.

The film work

The features, which lean much stranger than the television. Paprika is the prestige entry, Dead Leaves is the most deranged thing here by a wide margin, and Promare puts him back in the loud register that suits him.

Genres Mitsuo Iwata works in

More about Mitsuo Iwata

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