Acclaimed anime director, Mamoru Hosoda, has captured the hearts of many fans with works like The girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars, Wolf Children, and The Boy and The Best. However, the director also has one particular trend in his works, and that is the fact that they rarely feature any famous or popular seiyuu that is featured in many other anime works.

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While speaking in front of students at Waseda University for a special lecture, he was asked about how he chooses the seiyuu that will work on his movies. He answered that “he prefers actors whose performance draws not so much from technical skills, but from a sense of presence and humanity.”

This is taken into consideration since Hosoda is more likely to cast live-action actors like Suzu Hirose and Shota Sometani for his movies like The Boy and The Beast, rather than actual big-name seiyuu like Jun Fukuyama, Kana Hanazawa, and others.However, this might not be because he doesn’t like anime seiyuu, but rather because its more about scheduling restraints as well as Hosoda’s own filming style. He said that

“Professional [anime] voice actors are highly skilled, so you could record the dialogue for each character separately, But if you do that, they can’t feel and play off each other’s performances, so no matter how hard you try, the end product feels unbalanced. If you don’t have the performers recording their dialogue together, at the same time, it doesn’t come out right…If anime voice actors could open up enough time in their schedules to record for a movie together, there are people I think I could use.”

Seiyuu for anime are usually busy, so most of the time, they record their voices separately, and this is more true for big name-seiyuu. Hosoda’s reason is far more practical for his filming style, rather than a philosophical one. He also doesn’t voice his dissatisfaction with the seiyuu industry, unlike Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino, who has been critical of today’s seiyuu.

Source: Rocket News 24