Kotono Mitsuishi

Misato Katsuragi has two voices, and Kotono Mitsuishi keeps them in separate rooms. In company, in front of the teenagers she is supposed to be commanding, Misato is loud, lewd and pleased with herself. At home, among the beer cans and the penguin, the volume drops and something tired and guarded comes through that the office never hears. Mitsuishi does not signal the switch. She lets the flat do it, and on a first viewing we felt we had walked in on someone; the woman who had been shouting a minute earlier was suddenly not performing for anybody, and the change was in the breath, not the lines.

That double act is the career in small. She began as a voice actress in 1989, and within three years had the part that made her name: Usagi Tsukino in Sailor Moon (1992), the lead in a magical-girl series. She has said her own playful streak made Usagi a little cruder than the girl on the page, and we suspect the crudeness is why it stuck. Three years later came Misato in Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), and the adult side of the voice arrived whole.

Since then the work has divided along the same line. There is the comic, manic register, Excel in Excel Saga. And there is the cool grown woman, which is where she has mostly settled: Juri Arisugawa in Revolutionary Girl Utena, Murrue Ramius in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED (2002), where she also narrates, Boa Hancock in One Piece (1999), Mei Mei in Jujutsu Kaisen (2020). We have not reviewed those and the parts vary in size, but the casting pattern is plain. When a series wants a woman who sounds as though she has already made the decision, it calls her.

What makes the Evangelion performance more than a type is who she is playing against. Beside Megumi Ogata's Shinji, whose voice keeps failing him, and Megumi Hayashibara's Rei, who barely uses hers, Misato is the only adult in the flat, and Mitsuishi plays her as someone doing adulthood for an audience of two and not quite managing it. She has described what the role cost her. Of Misato's scenes of speaking from the heart, she told the pamphlet for The End of Evangelion: "My hands were shaking and I had to use all my will not to make noise crumpling the script I was holding."

The reservations are the trade's rather than hers. The loud Misato is a stock figure, and in a weaker series the beer-can scenes would be a running gag rather than a confession. She has also now been reprising Usagi and Misato for decades, in the later Evangelion films among others, and keeping a voice that young that long is a strain she shares with her whole generation; from the one series we have reviewed we cannot say how the later versions hold. If you have only heard Evangelion dubbed, go back to the Japanese track and stay for the flat. That is where she does the work, and it is quieter than her reputation.