Performer
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio rank
#8446
of 909177 performers
Top 1%
Kousuke Tanabe 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.
Kousuke Tanabe appears in 4 films in the Nutevio catalogue, and none of them would work the same way without Kousuke. My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission is the clearest case: a film rated 7.6 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, fantasy, adventure. It is a style built on what is withheld as much as what is played.
Working with Sunghoo Park, Shunsuke Tada, Kenji Nagasaki and others, Kousuke Tanabe 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.
My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission (2021) as (voice) · Monsters 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation (2024) as Villager (voice) · Macross Delta: Zettai Live!!!!!! (2021) as Additional Voices (voice)
Career snapshot
Ranked #8446 of 909177 performers tracked in the Nutevio library.
Films in Nutevio
4
2021–2024
Career length
3 yrs
Measured across our catalogue
Academy Awards
—
Unknown
Oscar nominations
—
Unknown
Highest Nutevio score
7.6
My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission
Average Nutevio score
6.9
Across catalogue work
Highest IMDb rating
7.6
My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission
Most frequent director
Sunghoo Park
1 film together
Longest collaboration
1×
With Sunghoo Park
Most common genre
Animation
4 titles
Average runtime
1h 23m
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
6.3
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
2020s
6.9 average MV
The 2020s are where the work and the material meet. Monsters 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation, Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These - Intrigue 1, My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission — the run our editors reach for first when the argument is about range rather than fame.
Highest average Nutevio score
2020s
6.9
Across 4 catalogue films in this decade, our scores never drop below the level a career is judged on.
Highest average IMDb rating
2020s
6.9
The public agrees most strongly about this stretch — useful context, and occasionally a decade behind our own reading.
Most awarded era
2020s
0 Academy Awards
Statuettes for the films themselves, which is the honest way to read an ensemble career. Monsters 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation, Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These - Intrigue 1, My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission.
Most productive era
2020s
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 | 2020s |
|---|---|
| Drama | 6.42 films |
| Action | 7.23 films |
| Romance | 6.71 film |
Chronology
Firsts and peaks
The turning points, in the order they happened.
First film in Nutevio · Highest rated performance · Career peak
2021My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission
Where our catalogue meets this career, as (voice). 7.6 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
2024Monsters 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation
The current state of the argument, as Villager (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.
4 of 4 films
as (voice)
Directed by Kenji Nagasaki
as Villager (voice)
Directed by Sunghoo Park
as Additional Voices (voice)
Directed by Shoji Kawamori
as Ensign
Directed by Shunsuke Tada
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
(voice)
My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission (2021)
Performance score7.4
The performance the rest of the career is read through. (voice) gives Kousuke Tanabe a structure to work against, and the film hands over its centre of gravity without hesitation.
View movie#2
Villager (voice)
Monsters 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation (2024)
Performance score7.1
Monsters 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Villager (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#3
Additional Voices (voice)
Macross Delta: Zettai Live!!!!!! (2021)
Performance score6.6
Macross Delta: Zettai Live!!!!!! asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Additional Voices (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#4
Ensign
Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These - Intrigue 1 (2022)
Performance score6.5
Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These - Intrigue 1 asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Ensign 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 (voice)
Start here. My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission is the clearest statement of what Kousuke Tanabe does — accessible, 105 minutes, and rated 7.6 by our editors. No context required.
Our editors order this path by accessibility first and chronology second. You meet Kousuke 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.
Macross Delta: Zettai Live!!!!!! (2021)
Keeps the action register of My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission but asks for a colder reading of it.
Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These - Intrigue 1 (2022)
Keeps the war register of Macross Delta: Zettai Live!!!!!! but asks for a colder reading of it.
Monsters 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation (2024)
Keeps the animation register of Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These - Intrigue 1 but asks for a colder reading of it.
Company kept
The directors and performers this career keeps returning to.
Shoji Kawamori
Director
1 film together
Notably Macross Delta: Zettai Live!!!!!!
Kenji Nagasaki
Director
1 film together
Notably My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission
Shunsuke Tada
Director
1 film together
Notably Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These - Intrigue 1
Sunghoo Park
Director
1 film together
Notably Monsters 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation
Behind the camera
Who casts this performer, how often, and what the pairing produces.
Kenji Nagasaki
Director
1 film together · 7.6 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
My Hero Academia: World Heroes' MissionSunghoo Park
Director
1 film together · 7.2 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Monsters 103 Mercies Dragon DamnationShoji Kawamori
Director
1 film together · 6.7 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Macross Delta: Zettai Live!!!!!!Shunsuke Tada
Director
1 film together · 6.1 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These - Intrigue 1Six 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
My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission
as (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
Macross Delta: Zettai Live!!!!!!
as Additional Voices (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
My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission
as (voice)
You can hear this reading in other actors' auditions a decade later — the surest measure of influence there is.
Best ensemble performance
Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These - Intrigue 1
as Ensign
Work that makes everyone else in the frame better without ever pulling the camera towards itself.
Career defining performance
My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission
as (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. Kousuke Tanabe 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
4 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
Monsters 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation
as Villager (voice)
The last five minutes reorganise everything before them, and hold up when you already know what's coming.
Best opening
My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission
as (voice)
A first sequence that states the rules of the film without explaining a single one of them.
Most emotional
Macross Delta: Zettai Live!!!!!!
as Additional Voices (voice)
The film where the technique steps aside and lets the feeling arrive undefended.
Best twist
Monsters 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation
as Villager (voice)
A reversal earned by information the film gave you and trusted you to misread.
Best visual achievement
My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission
as (voice)
Images that would survive with the sound switched off.
Best action sequence
Monsters 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation
as Villager (voice)
Geography, stakes and consequence held in the same frame — spectacle you can follow.
Best dialogue
Macross Delta: Zettai Live!!!!!!
as Additional Voices (voice)
Lines written to be spoken, staged so the pauses do half the work.
Most underrated film
Monsters 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation
as Villager (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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