Performer
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio rank
#17287
of 909177 performers
Top 5%
Kiyoshi Kobayashi represents the rare performer whose career became more ambitious with every decade — 41 years in, and Kiyoshi is still choosing the harder script.
The essay
Our editors on the work, the patterns and the reason this body of work holds together.
Kiyoshi Kobayashi appears in 7 films in the Nutevio catalogue, and none of them would work the same way without Kiyoshi. Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a God is the clearest case: a film rated 7.4 by our editors, where the performance carries weight the script only implies.
The recognisable elements are versatility, transformation, drama. Watch two of these films back to back and the method separates from the material — the same instrument, tuned differently for action, horror, fantasy. It is a style built on what is withheld as much as what is played.
Working with Hiroshi Ikehata, Hatsuki Tsuji, Shinji Aramaki and others, Kiyoshi Kobayashi 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.
Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a God (2007) as Watari (voice) · The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) as Daisuke Jigen (voice) · Lupin the IIIrd: Fujiko's Lie (2019) as Daisuke Jigen (voice)
Career snapshot
Ranked #17287 of 909177 performers tracked in the Nutevio library.
Films in Nutevio
7
1979–2020
Career length
41 yrs
Measured across our catalogue
Academy Awards
—
Unknown
Oscar nominations
—
Unknown
Highest Nutevio score
7.4
Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a God
Average Nutevio score
7.0
Across catalogue work
Highest IMDb rating
7.9
Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a God
Most frequent director
Hiroshi Ikehata
1 film together
Longest collaboration
1×
With Hiroshi Ikehata
Most common genre
Animation
7 titles
Average runtime
1h 37m
Across catalogue work
Golden Globe wins
—
Unknown
Nutevio metric
Ten weighted categories, applied identically to everyone we cover.
Nutevio Performer Score
7.2
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
7.0
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
2000s
7.4 average MV
The 2000s are where the work and the material meet. Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a God — the run our editors reach for first when the argument is about range rather than fame.
Highest average Nutevio score
2000s
7.4
Across 1 catalogue film in this decade, our scores never drop below the level a career is judged on.
Highest average IMDb rating
2000s
7.9
The public agrees most strongly about this stretch — useful context, and occasionally a decade behind our own reading.
Most awarded era
1970s
0 Academy Awards
Statuettes for the films themselves, which is the honest way to read an ensemble career. The Castle of Cagliostro.
Most productive era
2010s
4 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 | 1970s | 2000s | 2010s | 2020s |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drama | — | 7.41 film | 7.21 film | 7.01 film |
| Action | — | — | 6.83 films | 7.01 film |
| Thriller | — | 7.41 film | — | — |
| Comedy | 7.31 film | — | 6.62 films | — |
| Crime | 7.31 film | 7.41 film | 6.83 films | — |
| Horror | — | — | — | 7.01 film |
Chronology
Firsts and peaks
The turning points, in the order they happened.
First film in Nutevio · Career peak
Where our catalogue meets this career, as Daisuke Jigen (voice). Weighing billing against the film's own quality, this is the point where everything aligned at once.
Highest rated performance
2007Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a God
7.4 on the Nutevio scale, the top of the catalogue for this performer.
Most recent film
The current state of the argument, as Narration (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 Daisuke Jigen (voice)
Directed by Unknown
as Daisuke Jigen (voice)
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
as Daisuke Jigen (voice)
Directed by Hatsuki Tsuji
as Watari (voice)
Directed by Tetsuro Araki
as Narration (voice)
Directed by Hiroshi Ikehata
From the library
Every movie and TV credit stored for this name in the Nutevio catalogue — filter by media, role or sort by rating.
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The defining work
#1
Daisuke Jigen (voice)
Lupin the IIIrd: Fujiko's Lie (2019)
Performance score7.6
The performance the rest of the career is read through. Daisuke Jigen (voice) gives Kiyoshi Kobayashi a structure to work against, and the film hands over its centre of gravity without hesitation.
View movie#2
Daisuke Jigen (voice)
The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)
Performance score7.6
The Castle of Cagliostro asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Daisuke Jigen (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#3
Daisuke Jigen (voice)
Lupin the Third: Prison of the Past (2019)
Performance score7.4
Lupin the Third: Prison of the Past asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Daisuke Jigen (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#4
Watari (voice)
Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a God (2007)
Performance score7.2
Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a God asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Watari (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 Daisuke Jigen (voice)
Start here. Lupin the IIIrd: Fujiko's Lie is the clearest statement of what Kiyoshi Kobayashi does — accessible, 58 minutes, and rated 7.2 by our editors. No context required.
Our editors order this path by accessibility first and chronology second. You meet Kiyoshi 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.
The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)
Keeps the crime register of Lupin the IIIrd: Fujiko's Lie but asks for a colder reading of it.
Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a God (2007)
Keeps the crime register of The Castle of Cagliostro but asks for a colder reading of it.
Lupin the Third: Prison of the Past (2019)
Keeps the tv movie register of Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a God but asks for a colder reading of it.
BEM: BECOME HUMAN (2020)
Keeps the action register of Lupin the Third: Prison of the Past but asks for a colder reading of it.
Company kept
The directors and performers this career keeps returning to.
Hayao Miyazaki
Director
1 film together
Notably The Castle of Cagliostro
Tetsuro Araki
Director
1 film together
Notably Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a God
Shinji Aramaki
Director
1 film together
Notably Space Pirate Captain Harlock
Hatsuki Tsuji
Director
1 film together
Notably Lupin the Third: Prison of the Past
Hiroshi Ikehata
Director
1 film together
Notably BEM: BECOME HUMAN
Behind the camera
Who casts this performer, how often, and what the pairing produces.
Tetsuro Araki
Director
1 film together · 7.4 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a GodHayao Miyazaki
Director
1 film together · 7.3 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
The Castle of CagliostroHiroshi Ikehata
Director
1 film together · 7.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
BEM: BECOME HUMANHatsuki Tsuji
Director
1 film together · 7.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Lupin the Third: Prison of the PastShinji Aramaki
Director
1 film together · 6.6 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Space Pirate Captain HarlockSix 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
Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a God
as Watari (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
Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a God
as Watari (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
The Castle of Cagliostro
as Daisuke Jigen (voice)
You can hear this reading in other actors' auditions a decade later — the surest measure of influence there is.
Best ensemble performance
BEM: BECOME HUMAN
as Narration (voice)
Work that makes everyone else in the frame better without ever pulling the camera towards itself.
Career defining performance
Lupin the IIIrd: Fujiko's Lie
as Daisuke Jigen (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. Kiyoshi Kobayashi 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.
Career Achievement
Awarded
41 years of relevant work — not merely a long career, but a long career of choices.
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
Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a God
as Watari (voice)
The last five minutes reorganise everything before them, and hold up when you already know what's coming.
Best opening
BEM: BECOME HUMAN
as Narration (voice)
A first sequence that states the rules of the film without explaining a single one of them.
Most emotional
Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a God
as Watari (voice)
The film where the technique steps aside and lets the feeling arrive undefended.
Best twist
Death Note Relight 1: Visions of a God
as Watari (voice)
A reversal earned by information the film gave you and trusted you to misread.
Best visual achievement
Lupin the Third: Prison of the Past
as Daisuke Jigen (voice)
Images that would survive with the sound switched off.
Best action sequence
Lupin the Third: Goodbye Partner
as Daisuke Jigen (voice)
Geography, stakes and consequence held in the same frame — spectacle you can follow.
Best dialogue
Lupin the Third: Prison of the Past
as Daisuke Jigen (voice)
Lines written to be spoken, staged so the pauses do half the work.
Most underrated film
Lupin the IIIrd: Fujiko's Lie
as Daisuke Jigen (voice)
The public vote sits below ours on this one, and the direction is the reason for the gap.
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Have your say
Community
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Reference
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