Mayumi Tanaka

A girl falls out of the night sky and a boy at a mine catches her. In Castle in the Sky (1986) the boy is Pazu and the voice is Mayumi Tanaka's, and the thing to know about that voice is that it belongs to a woman born in 1955 who has been playing boys for most of her working life. The catch is the best moment in a film we rate highly, and we still held our breath at it, though the credit there goes to Miyazaki and Hirokata Takahashi's camera, which holds Sheeta small and pale while the dark rushes past. Tanaka's job in that scene is to be the ordinary boy the wonder lands on, and she does it.

She had been at it since 1978, when she made her debut as Ryoko Takagi. The pattern set early. Ryunosuke Fujinami in Urusei Yatsura (1981) is a girl raised as a boy; Krillin in Dragon Ball (1986) is a small bald fighter; Pazu the same year is an apprentice with a plane in his shed. Then in 1999 she took on Monkey D. Luffy in One Piece, and she is still saying his lines in the 2020s, alongside continuing Dragon Ball work opposite Masako Nozawa's Goku, all of it for Toei Animation and through her agency, Aoni Production.

What the profession consistently notices is the pitch. Her voice sits low for a woman, low enough to carry a shonen hero without the strain that creeps into adult actors doing children, and it has a scrappy, mischievous edge that suits boys who climb things they should not. She has said she does not read the manga her series are drawn from: "my style is to do my performances while still holding onto that fresh feeling of surprise." That is a method, not a boast, and it explains something about why a voice she has used for twenty-five years does not sound worn in.

The nearest anyone gets to a complaint is that she has been typecast in youthful male parts, and it is a fair note rather than a fault. We have reviewed only one of her films, and in it she is one voice among several in an opening we admired. Most of her career lives in series that run for years, which is where the endurance is, and where we cannot follow her in detail here.

She is approaching seventy and still voicing a teenager who never grows up. The consensus is that nobody has found a fault in her. We have one film's worth of evidence, and it agrees.