A light, unforced voice that a director can put almost anything behind. In Wolf Children Mamoru Hosoda puts a saint behind it, and Aoi Miyazaki plays her so easily that the strain never shows, which is the film's problem rather than hers.
Fi1m perspective
Hana is up in the night with a sick child who may be a wolf, the crops have failed and the money has gone, and the voice Aoi Miyazaki gives her does not tighten. It stays light. Mamoru Hosoda draws Hana smiling through nearly all of Wolf Children (2012), and Miyazaki does not argue with the drawing; she finds the smile in the line and leaves it there. It keeps a film about a widow raising two half-wolf children alone from going soggy, and it is the first thing you notice about her.
The voice is a late chapter. Miyazaki was in commercials at four and made her film debut at fourteen in Ano Natsu no Hi (1999). Attention outside Japan came with Shinji Aoyama's Eureka (2001), in which she plays Kozue Tamura, a survivor of a bus hijacking, and she went on to make three films with Aoyama in all, with the lead in Harmful Insect (2002) in between. Then the mainstream: Nana (2005), as Nana Komatsu, known as Hachi, and the television serial Atsuhime (2008). Since then she has moved between supporting parts in films such as The Great Passage (2013), television into the 2020s, and voice work for Hosoda, who brought her back for The Boy and the Beast (2015). The casting pattern is steady: young women getting through something, whether it is a hijacking or a relationship or an ordinary Tuesday.
What critics tend to say about her is that she is natural, transparent, easy to like. We can only speak to Hana, and there the description holds and also explains our one reservation about the film. On this evidence Miyazaki is a performer who gets out of the way. Give her a woman with something under the surface and the surface will presumably let you see it. Give her a woman Hosoda has decided has nothing under the surface but more giving, and she will play that truthfully too, which is how you end up with a mother who is tired only for the length of a scene and never angry across a dozen years. We sat through the debt, the dead husband and the sick child wishing, just once, that she had shouted at somebody. That is a note for Hosoda more than for her, but a less transparent actor might have smuggled the anger in anyway.
The Aoyama films are where the reputation was made and we have not reviewed them, so we will not pretend to. On the evidence of one performance, she is best used by a director who trusts her not to push and then gives her something worth not pushing. Wolf Children is the place to start, and it is very good. We would like to see what she does with a woman who is allowed to lose her temper.
Biography
Aoi Miyazaki is a Japanese actress. She began working in the entertainment industry at the age of four, appearing in commercials and as an extra in television dramas. Her film debut came at 14 in Ano Natsu no Hi (1999).
Miyazaki gained international attention for her role in Eureka (2001). She is known for her performance as Nana Komatsu in Nana (2005) and for voice roles including Hana in Wolf Children (2012), Shoko Sano in Colorful (2010), and Young Kyuta in The Boy and the Beast (2015). Her brother, Masaru Miyazaki, is also an actor; the siblings appeared together in Hatsukoi (2006).
