Moriyama's voice is low, gravelly and in no hurry, and in Porco Rosso it does what a lifetime of dubbing hard men prepared it for: it makes a pig in a deckchair sound like someone who has already seen the worst and has stopped mentioning it.
Fi1m perspective
A pig lies in a deckchair in a cove with a magazine over his snout and lets the telephone ring. Nothing in the drawing tells you how tired he is. The voice does, and it is Shūichirō Moriyama's: low, gravelly, unhurried, a man who has decided some time ago not to be impressed by anything and has kept to it. Porco Rosso (1992) is the only film of his we have reviewed, and it is the one that matters, because it is the one time he was asked to carry a picture rather than colour a corner of it.
The career behind that voice was long and mostly unseen. He began in the theatre with the Tōgei company in 1953, was on television by 1954 and in film and voice work by the end of the decade. Then, for years, he was the Japanese voice of other men: Telly Savalas, Spencer Tracy, Jean Gabin. That is not a list of actors you cast for lightness, and it tells you what directors heard in him. He was the gruff one, the veteran, the man in authority, in live action and in animation alike. The anime work grew from the 1980s: a king in Dragon Ball: Curse of the Blood Rubies (1986), a supporting part in Ninja Scroll (1993), narration and older figures in games and series, and as late as Terror in Resonance (2014). He turned up in the flesh too, in Shall We Dance? (1996). We have not written about those and will not pretend to.
What we can speak to is one scene. At night, beside the plane, Porco tells Fio about the war: a dogfight, and then the fallen aircraft rising past him towards a pale band of cloud, hundreds of them, the pilots small and still in their seats. Miyazaki draws it as a white river across the sky. Moriyama tells it flat, with no catch in the voice, no pause for us to feel something, and that is exactly why it moved us more than we expected. A lesser actor would have let the voice crack. Moriyama trusts that a man who saw that would describe it the way you describe a road you once drove, and he is right.
That refusal to ask for sympathy is the whole performance. Porco is charming, rude, lazy and decent, and Moriyama plays none of it up; he lets the dialogue be funny and stays out of its way. The film never says why Porco is a pig, and the voice never wonders either.
It is a strange shape for a career: decades of lending a voice to famous faces, and then one afternoon in a cove where the face was a cartoon and the voice was, for once, entirely his own. If you know him from nothing else, that is where to start, and there is a fair chance it is where you will stop.
Biography
Shūichirō Moriyama (also credited as Shuichiro Moriyama or under his birth name Hiroo Ōtsuka) was a Japanese actor and voice actor. He worked in live-action television, film and theatre from the late 1950s, and became prominent as a voice artist, providing the official Japanese dubbing for actors including Telly Savalas, Jean Gabin, Spencer Tracy and Lino Ventura.
Moriyama voiced the title character in the Studio Ghibli film Porco Rosso (1992). Other notable voice roles include Sakaki Hyobu in Ninja Scroll (1993), Gurumesu in Dragon Ball: Curse of the Blood Rubies (1986) and Shunzou Mamiya in Terror in Resonance (2014). He also appeared in the live-action film Shall We Dance? (1996). He died on 8 February 2021.
