Yuji Ueda

Yuji Ueda has voiced Brock in Pokemon since 1997, which amounts to several hundred episodes and a shelf of features in the same warm, faintly exasperated register, and he also voices Wobbuffet, a creature whose entire vocabulary is its own name. Those two jobs are the career in miniature: the dependable straight man, and the gag nobody else could sell for thirty years without it going stale.

He came out of Fukuoka into the 1990s anime boom, and the range in that decade was wide. Sanosuke Sagara in Rurouni Kenshin is a brawler with a code and a permanent chip on his shoulder. Keitaro Urashima in Love Hina is a walking apology. Akito Tenkawa in Martian Successor Nadesico is a cook who has no interest in being a pilot. Then Detroit Metal City in 2008 handed him Johannes Krauser II, a mild young man who becomes a shrieking death metal demon the moment he is on stage, a part that needs two entirely unrelated voices out of one throat.

He has settled into the ensemble work that keeps a production standing up: Jean Havoc in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Itsuki Marude in Tokyo Ghoul, Shiro Iori in Kill la Kill, Watchdog Man in One-Punch Man, Horohoro in both the 2001 Shaman King and its 2021 remake. His credit on the 1995 Ghost in the Shell reads simply as Communication, which is about as far down a call sheet as a working voice actor can be filed.