Shinobu Otake
Shinobu Otake is an actor, born 1957.
Japanese awards juries found Shinobu Otake early and never really let go. She has won three Japanese Academy Awards: best actress in 2000 for Railroad Man, and, in a single year in 1979, both best actress for The Incident and best supporting actress for another release from the same period. She also took best actress at the 12th Hochi Film Award, and again at the 25th Moscow International Film Festival for Owl. Twelve nominations sit behind those wins.
Born in Edogawa in 1957, she has spent the decades since playing mothers, and has never once made one warm by default. The mother in Our Little Sister gets a handful of scenes and a great deal of friction out of them; Shizue Sato in Railroad Man is a wife written mostly in absence; the mothers in GO and Pieta in the Toilet are difficult in different directions. Her trick is refusing the small softening gestures that actresses usually smuggle into these parts.
The second career is a surprise: animation studios keep hiring her for the older woman at the centre of a household. She is Homily in The Secret World of Arrietty, Mrs. Kurokawa in The Wind Rises, Aiko in The Boy and the Heron, Great-Aunt Charlotte in Mary and The Witch's Flower, Kiwa-san in The House of the Lost on the Cape, and the title character in Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko. The live-action work has not slowed either, from Black Widow Business to Hell Dogs.
Movies (51)
- The Boy and the Heron (2023)
- The Secret World of Arrietty (2010)
- The Wind Rises (2013)
- Mary and The Witch's Flower (2017)
- Our Little Sister (2015)
- The Gate of Youth Part 2 (1977)
- Hell Dogs (2022)
- Ritual (2000)
- Railroad Man (1999)
- GO (2001)
- Owl (2003)
- Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko (2021)
- Nomitori Samurai (2018)
- Welcome to the Quiet Room (2007)
- Before the Vigil (2013)
- The House of the Lost on the Cape (2021)
- Otakus in Love (2004)
- Sanada 10 Braves (2016)
- Pieta in the Toilet (2015)
- A Night In Nude: Salvation (2010)
- Round About Midnight (1999)
- Twelve Months (1980)
- Mahjong Horoki (1984)
- Black Widow Business (2016)
- The Gate of Youth (1975)
- Nomugi Pass (1979)
- Gonin 2 (1996)
- Galaxy Turnpike (2015)
- Returning the Favor (2006)
- The Black House (1999)
TV (9)
Where to start with Shinobu Otake
The award-winning entry point is Railroad Man, where she plays a wife who exists largely in the memory of a stationmaster, and gets more out of that than the setup deserves. If you would rather see her at full length, Our Little Sister is the better film: she has only a few scenes as the mother, and every one of them tilts the house sideways.
Go back for The Incident, one of the two 1978 performances that first got the juries' attention, and for Owl, the film that won her a prize in Moscow and is the strangest thing here by a wide margin.
Then take the animation seriously rather than as a footnote. The Secret World of Arrietty gives her the most to do, all fuss and worry; The Boy and the Heron uses her briefly and well; Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko hands her a title role built entirely on volume and appetite.