Performer
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio rank
#2523
of 909177 performers
Top 1%
Kana Ichinose works on versatility rather than volume, and the catalogue keeps proving that the quieter choice was the correct one.
The essay
Our editors on the work, the patterns and the reason this body of work holds together.
Kana Ichinose appears in 7 films in the Nutevio catalogue, and none of them would work the same way without Kana. Unanswered//butterfly is the clearest case: a film rated 8.0 by our editors, where the performance carries weight the script only implies.
The recognisable elements are versatility, transformation, quiet performance. Watch two of these films back to back and the method separates from the material — the same instrument, tuned differently for action, science fiction, fantasy. It is a style built on what is withheld as much as what is played.
Working with Tadahiro Yoshihira, Atsushi Nishigori, Keiichiro Saito and others, Kana Ichinose helped set a standard other performers now audition against. Awards bodies have been slower than the work, which is usually the sign of a career built on choices rather than campaigns.
Unanswered//butterfly (2026) as Iori (voice) · Kaguya-sama: Love Is War -The First Kiss That Never Ends- (2022) as Maki Shijou (voice) · Weathering with You (2019) as Sasaki (voice)
Career snapshot
Ranked #2523 of 909177 performers tracked in the Nutevio library.
Films in Nutevio
7
2019–2026
Career length
7 yrs
Measured across our catalogue
Academy Awards
—
Unknown
Oscar nominations
—
Unknown
Highest Nutevio score
8.0
Unanswered//butterfly
Average Nutevio score
6.2
Across catalogue work
Highest IMDb rating
8.0
Unanswered//butterfly
Most frequent director
Keiichiro Saito
2 films together
Longest collaboration
2×
With Keiichiro Saito
Most common genre
Animation
7 titles
Average runtime
1h 35m
Across catalogue work
Golden Globe wins
—
Unknown
Nutevio metric
Ten weighted categories, applied identically to everyone we cover.
Nutevio Performer Score
6.8
out of 10
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio metric
Cultural impact and legacy, measured separately from craft — how far the work travelled once it left the cinema.
Nutevio Influence Score
6.1
out of 10
A quieter influence — felt inside the films rather than across the industry.
How far the work travelled past the people who saw it first.
What survives once the release-week conversation has burned off.
Institutional acknowledgement, weighted but never decisive.
Years of chosen, relevant work rather than years merely employed.
Statuettes, read as evidence rather than verdict.
Roles named without needing the film named alongside them.
Directors who wrote parts because this performer existed.
The reading other performers now have to answer.
Actor DNA
A fingerprint derived from the roles themselves — register, range and the kind of film they carry.
The shape of a career
Every performance plotted in time. Hover a point to read the title behind it.
Peak years
Where the scores, the awards and the sheer volume of work agree with each other.
Best decade
2010s
6.7 average MV
The 2010s are where the work and the material meet. Weathering with You, Star☆Twinkle PreCure the Movie: Wish Upon a Song of Stars — the run our editors reach for first when the argument is about range rather than fame.
Highest average Nutevio score
2010s
6.7
Across 2 catalogue films in this decade, our scores never drop below the level a career is judged on.
Highest average IMDb rating
2010s
6.7
The public agrees most strongly about this stretch — useful context, and occasionally a decade behind our own reading.
Most awarded era
2010s
0 Academy Awards
Statuettes for the films themselves, which is the honest way to read an ensemble career. Weathering with You, Star☆Twinkle PreCure the Movie: Wish Upon a Song of Stars.
Most productive era
2020s
5 films
The busiest stretch of the catalogue — volume that reads as appetite rather than availability.
Range, mapped
Genres down the side, decades across the top. Warmer cells mean stronger titles.
| Genre | 2010s | 2020s |
|---|---|---|
| Drama | 7.81 film | 0.01 film |
| Action | 5.51 film | 4.02 films |
| Comedy | 5.51 film | 7.33 films |
| Romance | 7.81 film | 8.01 film |
Chronology
Firsts and peaks
The turning points, in the order they happened.
First film in Nutevio
Where our catalogue meets this career, as Sasaki (voice).
Highest rated performance · Career peak
2022Kaguya-sama: Love Is War -The First Kiss That Never Ends-
8.0 on the Nutevio scale, the top of the catalogue for this performer. Weighing billing against the film's own quality, this is the point where everything aligned at once.
Most recent film
2026GROTESQQQUE
The current state of the argument, as Elie (voice).
Our order
Every performance in the catalogue, ordered by Nutevio Score.
Every title
Filter by genre or decade, and compare any two titles side by side.
7 of 7 films
as Iori (voice)
Directed by Tadahiro Yoshihira
as Maki Shijou (voice)
Directed by Mamoru Hatakeyama
as Sasaki (voice)
Directed by Makoto Shinkai
as Hitori's Fan #1 / Live Concert Audience Member (voice)
Directed by Keiichiro Saito
as Hitori's Fan #1 (voice)
Directed by Keiichiro Saito
From the library
Every movie and TV credit stored for this name in the Nutevio catalogue — filter by media, role or sort by rating.
Loading credits…
The defining work
#1
Iori (voice)
Unanswered//butterfly (2026)
Performance score7.8
The performance the rest of the career is read through. Iori (voice) gives Kana Ichinose a structure to work against, and the film hands over its centre of gravity without hesitation.
View movie#2
Maki Shijou (voice)
Kaguya-sama: Love Is War -The First Kiss That Never Ends- (2022)
Performance score7.8
Kaguya-sama: Love Is War -The First Kiss That Never Ends- asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Maki Shijou (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#3
Sasaki (voice)
Weathering with You (2019)
Performance score7.6
Weathering with You asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Sasaki (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#4
Hitori's Fan #1 / Live Concert Audience Member (voice)
BOCCHI THE ROCK! Recap Part 2 (2024)
Performance score7.0
BOCCHI THE ROCK! Recap Part 2 asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Hitori's Fan #1 / Live Concert Audience Member (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movieStart here
A guided path through the work, ordered so each film explains the next.
Best entry point
as Iori (voice)
Start here. Unanswered//butterfly is the clearest statement of what Kana Ichinose does — accessible, 118 minutes, and rated 8.0 by our editors. No context required.
Our editors order this path by accessibility first and chronology second. You meet Kana at the most legible performance, then move forward in time so each film reads as a response to the one before it rather than a repetition of it.
Weathering with You (2019)
Keeps the fantasy register of Unanswered//butterfly but asks for a colder reading of it.
Kaguya-sama: Love Is War -The First Kiss That Never Ends- (2022)
Keeps the romance register of Weathering with You but asks for a colder reading of it.
BOCCHI THE ROCK! Recap Part 2 (2024)
Keeps the comedy register of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War -The First Kiss That Never Ends- but asks for a colder reading of it.
BOCCHI THE ROCK! Recap Part 1 (2024)
Same director as BOCCHI THE ROCK! Recap Part 2, different problem to solve. Watching them in order shows how much of the effect was the collaboration.
Company kept
The directors and performers this career keeps returning to.
Keiichiro Saito
Director
2 films together
Notably BOCCHI THE ROCK! Recap Part 2
Yuta Tanaka
Director
1 film together
Notably Star☆Twinkle PreCure the Movie: Wish Upon a Song of Stars
Makoto Shinkai
Director
1 film together
Notably Weathering with You
Mamoru Hatakeyama
Director
1 film together
Notably Kaguya-sama: Love Is War -The First Kiss That Never Ends-
Atsushi Nishigori
Director
1 film together
Notably GROTESQQQUE
Tadahiro Yoshihira
Director
1 film together
Notably Unanswered//butterfly
Behind the camera
Who casts this performer, how often, and what the pairing produces.
Keiichiro Saito
Director
2 films together · 7.0 avg MV
A working relationship rather than a booking — 2 films, and the register shifts each time.
Best film together
BOCCHI THE ROCK! Recap Part 2Tadahiro Yoshihira
Director
1 film together · 8.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Unanswered//butterflyMamoru Hatakeyama
Director
1 film together · 8.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Kaguya-sama: Love Is War -The First Kiss That Never Ends-Makoto Shinkai
Director
1 film together · 7.8 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Weathering with YouYuta Tanaka
Director
1 film together · 5.5 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Star☆Twinkle PreCure the Movie: Wish Upon a Song of StarsAtsushi Nishigori
Director
1 film together · 0.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
GROTESQQQUESix degrees
Follow the thread outward — director, film, co-star, and the film after that.
Categories of our own
Six editorial categories we apply to every performer we cover.
Most rewatchable
Unanswered//butterfly
as Iori (voice)
The one that survives a fourth viewing. Nothing in the performance depends on surprise, which is why it keeps paying out.
Most emotional performance
Weathering with You
as Sasaki (voice)
Grief played at conversational volume. The film never asks the audience to cry; the performance simply makes it difficult not to.
Most influential performance
Kaguya-sama: Love Is War -The First Kiss That Never Ends-
as Maki Shijou (voice)
You can hear this reading in other actors' auditions a decade later — the surest measure of influence there is.
Best ensemble performance
Weathering with You
as Sasaki (voice)
Work that makes everyone else in the frame better without ever pulling the camera towards itself.
Career defining performance
Unanswered//butterfly
as Iori (voice)
If the career had to be argued in a single scene, our editors would pick one from this film and rest the case.
In their films' words
“You can build a whole film around a performer who knows when not to speak. Kana Ichinose has known it for a long time.”
Head to head
Put two careers on the same scale and see where the argument actually sits.
Ours alone
Recognitions handed out by this desk, on criteria no awards body uses.
Modern Classic Performer
Awarded
Defining performances delivered inside the last twenty-five years, in films already being taught rather than merely remembered.
Animation Legend
Awarded
7 catalogue titles in animation, each one a reference point for the films that followed.
Our desk
Best ending, best opening, best twist and the rest — categories we apply to everyone we cover.
Best ending
Weathering with You
as Sasaki (voice)
The last five minutes reorganise everything before them, and hold up when you already know what's coming.
Best opening
Unanswered//butterfly
as Iori (voice)
A first sequence that states the rules of the film without explaining a single one of them.
Most emotional
Weathering with You
as Sasaki (voice)
The film where the technique steps aside and lets the feeling arrive undefended.
Best twist
Weathering with You
as Sasaki (voice)
A reversal earned by information the film gave you and trusted you to misread.
Best visual achievement
Unanswered//butterfly
as Iori (voice)
Images that would survive with the sound switched off.
Best action sequence
Star☆Twinkle PreCure the Movie: Wish Upon a Song of Stars
as Girl (voice)
Geography, stakes and consequence held in the same frame — spectacle you can follow.
Best dialogue
Star☆Twinkle PreCure the Movie: Wish Upon a Song of Stars
as Girl (voice)
Lines written to be spoken, staged so the pauses do half the work.
Most underrated film
BOCCHI THE ROCK! Recap Part 1
as Hitori's Fan #1 (voice)
The public vote sits below ours on this one, and the direction is the reason for the gap.
If you like this performer
Tom Hanks
Built a career in the same territory: animation and family
Bonnie Hunt
Built a career in the same territory: animation and family
Tom Wilkinson
Built a career in the same territory: comedy and adventure
Matt Damon
Built a career in the same territory: adventure and drama
Elliot Page
Built a career in the same territory: adventure and drama
Michael Caine
Built a career in the same territory: adventure and drama
Have your say
Community
Which Kana Ichinose performance holds up best?
Our readers argue about this one. Make your case, or read the ranked debate already in progress.
Join the conversation
Reference
Continue exploring
Trending performers
Directors they work with
Collections to read next
