Performer
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio rank
#4866
of 909177 performers
Top 1%
Masaya Fukunishi 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.
Masaya Fukunishi appears in 7 films in the Nutevio catalogue, and none of them would work the same way without Masaya. Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl is the clearest case: a film rated 7.7 by our editors, where the performance carries weight the script only implies.
The recognisable elements are versatility, quiet performance, transformation. Watch two of these films back to back and the method separates from the material — the same instrument, tuned differently for action, science fiction, animation. It is a style built on what is withheld as much as what is played.
Working with Tomomi Kamiya, Tetsuro Araki, Shunsuke Tada and others, Masaya Fukunishi 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.
Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl (2019) as Shoko's Father (voice) · My Hero Academia: Two Heroes (2018) as (voice) · Kaiju No. 8: Mission Recon (2025) as Kafka Hibino / Kaiju No. 8 (voice)
Career snapshot
Ranked #4866 of 909177 performers tracked in the Nutevio library.
Films in Nutevio
7
2018–2025
Career length
7 yrs
Measured across our catalogue
Academy Awards
—
Unknown
Oscar nominations
—
Unknown
Highest Nutevio score
7.7
Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl
Average Nutevio score
5.1
Across catalogue work
Highest IMDb rating
8.2
Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl
Most frequent director
Shunsuke Tada
2 films together
Longest collaboration
2×
With Shunsuke Tada
Most common genre
Animation
7 titles
Average runtime
1h 36m
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
7.7 average MV
The 2010s are where the work and the material meet. Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl, My Hero Academia: Two Heroes — the run our editors reach for first when the argument is about range rather than fame.
Highest average Nutevio score
2010s
7.7
Across 2 catalogue films in this decade, our scores never drop below the level a career is judged on.
Highest average IMDb rating
2010s
8.1
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. Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl, My Hero Academia: Two Heroes.
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 | 7.71 film | 3.12 films |
| Action | 7.61 film | 7.21 film |
| Romance | 7.71 film | — |
Chronology
Firsts and peaks
The turning points, in the order they happened.
First film in Nutevio
2018My Hero Academia: Two Heroes
Where our catalogue meets this career, as (voice).
Highest rated performance
2019Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl
7.7 on the Nutevio scale, the top of the catalogue for this performer.
Career peak · Most recent film
2025Kaiju No. 8: Mission Recon
Weighing billing against the film's own quality, this is the point where everything aligned at once. The current state of the argument, as Kafka Hibino / Kaiju No. 8 (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 Kafka Hibino / Kaiju No. 8 (voice)
Directed by Tomomi Kamiya
as Shoko's Father (voice)
Directed by Soichi Masui
as (voice)
Directed by Kenji Nagasaki
as (voice)
Directed by Tetsuro Araki
as Drewentz
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
Kafka Hibino / Kaiju No. 8 (voice)
Kaiju No. 8: Mission Recon (2025)
Performance score7.8
The performance the rest of the career is read through. Kafka Hibino / Kaiju No. 8 (voice) gives Masaya Fukunishi a structure to work against, and the film hands over its centre of gravity without hesitation.
View movie#2
Shoko's Father (voice)
Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl (2019)
Performance score7.5
Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Shoko's Father (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#3
(voice)
My Hero Academia: Two Heroes (2018)
Performance score7.4
My Hero Academia: Two Heroes asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#4
(voice)
Bubble (2022)
Performance score6.9
Bubble asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. (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 Kafka Hibino / Kaiju No. 8 (voice)
Start here. Kaiju No. 8: Mission Recon is the clearest statement of what Masaya Fukunishi does — accessible, 110 minutes, and rated 7.2 by our editors. No context required.
Our editors order this path by accessibility first and chronology second. You meet Masaya 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.
My Hero Academia: Two Heroes (2018)
Keeps the action register of Kaiju No. 8: Mission Recon but asks for a colder reading of it.
Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl (2019)
Keeps the fantasy register of My Hero Academia: Two Heroes but asks for a colder reading of it.
Bubble (2022)
Keeps the fantasy register of Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl but asks for a colder reading of it.
Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These - Intrigue 1 (2022)
Keeps the science fiction register of Bubble but asks for a colder reading of it.
Company kept
The directors and performers this career keeps returning to.
Shunsuke Tada
Director
2 films together
Notably Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These - Intrigue 1
Kenji Nagasaki
Director
1 film together
Notably My Hero Academia: Two Heroes
Soichi Masui
Director
1 film together
Notably Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl
Takaharu Ozaki
Director
1 film together
Notably WAVE!! Surfing Yappe!! - Chapter 2
Tetsuro Araki
Director
1 film together
Notably Bubble
Tomomi Kamiya
Director
1 film together
Notably Kaiju No. 8: Mission Recon
Behind the camera
Who casts this performer, how often, and what the pairing produces.
Shunsuke Tada
Director
2 films together · 3.1 avg MV
A working relationship rather than a booking — 2 films, and the register shifts each time.
Best film together
Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These - Intrigue 1Soichi Masui
Director
1 film together · 7.7 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming GirlKenji 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: Two HeroesTomomi Kamiya
Director
1 film together · 7.2 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Kaiju No. 8: Mission ReconTetsuro Araki
Director
1 film together · 7.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
BubbleTakaharu Ozaki
Director
1 film together · 0.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
WAVE!! Surfing Yappe!! - Chapter 2Six 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
Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl
as Shoko's Father (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
Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl
as Shoko's Father (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
Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl
as Shoko's Father (voice)
You can hear this reading in other actors' auditions a decade later — the surest measure of influence there is.
Best ensemble performance
My Hero Academia: Two Heroes
as (voice)
Work that makes everyone else in the frame better without ever pulling the camera towards itself.
Career defining performance
Kaiju No. 8: Mission Recon
as Kafka Hibino / Kaiju No. 8 (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. Masaya Fukunishi 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
Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl
as Shoko's Father (voice)
The last five minutes reorganise everything before them, and hold up when you already know what's coming.
Best opening
My Hero Academia: Two Heroes
as (voice)
A first sequence that states the rules of the film without explaining a single one of them.
Most emotional
Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl
as Shoko's Father (voice)
The film where the technique steps aside and lets the feeling arrive undefended.
Best twist
Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl
as Shoko's Father (voice)
A reversal earned by information the film gave you and trusted you to misread.
Best visual achievement
My Hero Academia: Two Heroes
as (voice)
Images that would survive with the sound switched off.
Best action sequence
My Hero Academia: Two Heroes
as (voice)
Geography, stakes and consequence held in the same frame — spectacle you can follow.
Best dialogue
Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl
as Shoko's Father (voice)
Lines written to be spoken, staged so the pauses do half the work.
Most underrated film
Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These - Intrigue 1
as Drewentz
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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