Actor
Aya Hisakawa has an exceptional number of top roles to her credit, fan
favorites that include Kerochan in Card Captor Sakura and Skuld in Oh
My Goddess, along with Sailor Mercury in Sailor Moon. Her characters
often have an edge to them - "What's wrong with calling an idiot an
idiot you idiot," was one of her lines as Sohma Yuki in Fruits Basket.
And sometimes those characters are superhuman, as in the recent Tenjho
Tenge series where she plays one of the Natsume sisters who can
transform her body from that of a child to a curvaceous woman. "She has
this very special ability - she can shrink herself - so she has these
two distinctive voices," Hisakawa said. "There aren't too many shows
where you can use two distinctive voices so it's a very good role."
Hisakawa was asked about her Nakajima Youko role in Twelve Kingdoms,
which she called her first lead role in an anime TV series. "I hoped
that I would get the call for a main character," she said about her
Twelve Kingdoms audition," but the call I got wasn't for Youko, it was
for Shokkei. After reading for Shokkei, the staff asked me if i could
read for Youko." Hisakawa said she hadn't researched the Twelve
Kingdoms source material as she had for other roles where she had
auditions, but that didn't make a difference this time - she read
Youko's lines and got the part. "This was for the main character for a
show that was broadcast on NHK, so i was very excited to get that role."
Whether
in English or Japanese, acting is driven by experience and imagination,
but the skill of voice acting is different than it seems from the
outside. Before she went to acting school, Hisakawa thought all actors
needed to do was to stand in front of a microphone and read lines. Then
she went to school and found that school didn't take her into a studio;
instead, they taught her to perform on stage, dance and sing, before
any sort of voice acting was considered. "Those were the basics that I
got trained in," she said. "Voice acting is a very specific occupation.
You have to know with your whole body what something should be like,
but your execution is limited to what you can do behind a microphone -
it's a very difficult thing." The imagination comes into play when an
actor has to figure how a character should feel. "If you're going to
perform the role of an idol singer, it would be good if you could read
music and sing. But, your roles may not be limited to being human - it
could be an inanimate object or an animal. There should be no limit to
the amount of knowledge that you should want to acquire."
Actor
Aya Hisakawa has an exceptional number of top roles to her credit, fan
favorites that include Kerochan in Card Captor Sakura and Skuld in Oh
My Goddess, along with Sailor Mercury in Sailor Moon. Her characters
often have an edge to them - "What's wrong with calling an idiot an
idiot you idiot," was one of her lines as Sohma Yuki in Fruits Basket.
And sometimes those characters are superhuman, as in the recent Tenjho
Tenge series where she plays one of the Natsume sisters who can
transform her body from that of a child to a curvaceous woman. "She has
this very special ability - she can shrink herself - so she has these
two distinctive voices," Hisakawa said. "There aren't too many shows
where you can use two distinctive voices so it's a very good role."
Hisakawa was asked about her Nakajima Youko role in Twelve Kingdoms,
which she called her first lead role in an anime TV series. "I hoped
that I would get the call for a main character," she said about her
Twelve Kingdoms audition," but the call I got wasn't for Youko, it was
for Shokkei. After reading for Shokkei, the staff asked me if i could
read for Youko." Hisakawa said she hadn't researched the Twelve
Kingdoms source material as she had for other roles where she had
auditions, but that didn't make a difference this time - she read
Youko's lines and got the part. "This was for the main character for a
show that was broadcast on NHK, so i was very excited to get that role."
Whether
in English or Japanese, acting is driven by experience and imagination,
but the skill of voice acting is different than it seems from the
outside. Before she went to acting school, Hisakawa thought all actors
needed to do was to stand in front of a microphone and read lines. Then
she went to school and found that school didn't take her into a studio;
instead, they taught her to perform on stage, dance and sing, before
any sort of voice acting was considered. "Those were the basics that I
got trained in," she said. "Voice acting is a very specific occupation.
You have to know with your whole body what something should be like,
but your execution is limited to what you can do behind a microphone -
it's a very difficult thing." The imagination comes into play when an
actor has to figure how a character should feel. "If you're going to
perform the role of an idol singer, it would be good if you could read
music and sing. But, your roles may not be limited to being human - it
could be an inanimate object or an animal. There should be no limit to
the amount of knowledge that you should want to acquire."
