Performer
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio rank
#40719
of 909177 performers
Top 5%
Saya Hitomi works on quiet performance 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.
Saya Hitomi appears in 3 films in the Nutevio catalogue, and none of them would work the same way without Saya. Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era is the clearest case: a film rated 8.6 by our editors, where the performance carries weight the script only implies.
The recognisable elements are quiet performance, comedy, emotional range. Watch two of these films back to back and the method separates from the material — the same instrument, tuned differently for romance, comedy, drama. It is a style built on what is withheld as much as what is played.
Working with Shinsuke Yanagi, Susumu Mitsunaka, Ken Yamamoto, Saya Hitomi 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.
Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era (2024) as Mai (voice) · HAIKYU!! The Dumpster Battle (2024) as Cheering Section Member (voice) · Senpai Is an Otokonoko Movie: Sunshine After the Rain (2025) as Girl (voice)
Career snapshot
Ranked #40719 of 909177 performers tracked in the Nutevio library.
Films in Nutevio
3
2024–2025
Career length
1 yrs
Measured across our catalogue
Academy Awards
—
Unknown
Oscar nominations
—
Unknown
Highest Nutevio score
8.6
Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era
Average Nutevio score
7.9
Across catalogue work
Highest IMDb rating
8.6
Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era
Most frequent director
Shinsuke Yanagi
1 film together
Longest collaboration
1×
With Shinsuke Yanagi
Most common genre
Comedy
3 titles
Average runtime
1h 32m
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
6.9
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
7.9 average MV
The 2020s are where the work and the material meet. Senpai Is an Otokonoko Movie: Sunshine After the Rain, HAIKYU!! The Dumpster Battle, Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era — the run our editors reach for first when the argument is about range rather than fame.
Highest average Nutevio score
2020s
7.9
Across 3 catalogue films in this decade, our scores never drop below the level a career is judged on.
Highest average IMDb rating
2020s
7.9
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. Senpai Is an Otokonoko Movie: Sunshine After the Rain, HAIKYU!! The Dumpster Battle, Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era.
Most productive era
2020s
3 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 | 8.02 films |
| Comedy | 7.93 films |
| Romance | 7.41 film |
Chronology
Firsts and peaks
The turning points, in the order they happened.
First film in Nutevio
2024HAIKYU!! The Dumpster Battle
Where our catalogue meets this career, as Cheering Section Member (voice).
Highest rated performance · Career peak
2024Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era
8.6 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
2025Senpai Is an Otokonoko Movie: Sunshine After the Rain
The current state of the argument, as Girl (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.
3 of 3 films
as Mai (voice)
Directed by Ken Yamamoto
as Cheering Section Member (voice)
Directed by Susumu Mitsunaka
as Girl (voice)
Directed by Shinsuke Yanagi
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
Mai (voice)
Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era (2024)
Performance score8.3
The performance the rest of the career is read through. Mai (voice) gives Saya Hitomi a structure to work against, and the film hands over its centre of gravity without hesitation.
View movie#2
Cheering Section Member (voice)
HAIKYU!! The Dumpster Battle (2024)
Performance score7.6
HAIKYU!! The Dumpster Battle asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Cheering Section Member (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#3
Girl (voice)
Senpai Is an Otokonoko Movie: Sunshine After the Rain (2025)
Performance score7.2
Senpai Is an Otokonoko Movie: Sunshine After the Rain asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Girl (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 Mai (voice)
Start here. Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era is the clearest statement of what Saya Hitomi does — accessible, 108 minutes, and rated 8.6 by our editors. No context required.
Our editors order this path by accessibility first and chronology second. You meet Saya 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.
HAIKYU!! The Dumpster Battle (2024)
Keeps the comedy register of Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era but asks for a colder reading of it.
Senpai Is an Otokonoko Movie: Sunshine After the Rain (2025)
Keeps the comedy register of HAIKYU!! The Dumpster Battle but asks for a colder reading of it.
Company kept
The directors and performers this career keeps returning to.
Ken Yamamoto
Director
1 film together
Notably Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era
Susumu Mitsunaka
Director
1 film together
Notably HAIKYU!! The Dumpster Battle
Shinsuke Yanagi
Director
1 film together
Notably Senpai Is an Otokonoko Movie: Sunshine After the Rain
Behind the camera
Who casts this performer, how often, and what the pairing produces.
Ken Yamamoto
Director
1 film together · 8.6 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New EraSusumu Mitsunaka
Director
1 film together · 7.8 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
HAIKYU!! The Dumpster BattleShinsuke Yanagi
Director
1 film together · 7.4 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Senpai Is an Otokonoko Movie: Sunshine After the RainSix 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
Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era
as Mai (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
Senpai Is an Otokonoko Movie: Sunshine After the Rain
as Girl (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
Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era
as Mai (voice)
You can hear this reading in other actors' auditions a decade later — the surest measure of influence there is.
Best ensemble performance
HAIKYU!! The Dumpster Battle
as Cheering Section Member (voice)
Work that makes everyone else in the frame better without ever pulling the camera towards itself.
Career defining performance
Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era
as Mai (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. Saya Hitomi 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.
Comedy Legend
Awarded
3 catalogue titles in comedy, 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
Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era
as Mai (voice)
The last five minutes reorganise everything before them, and hold up when you already know what's coming.
Best opening
Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era
as Mai (voice)
A first sequence that states the rules of the film without explaining a single one of them.
Most emotional
Senpai Is an Otokonoko Movie: Sunshine After the Rain
as Girl (voice)
The film where the technique steps aside and lets the feeling arrive undefended.
Best twist
Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era
as Mai (voice)
A reversal earned by information the film gave you and trusted you to misread.
Best visual achievement
Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era
as Mai (voice)
Images that would survive with the sound switched off.
Best action sequence
Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era
as Mai (voice)
Geography, stakes and consequence held in the same frame — spectacle you can follow.
Best dialogue
Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era
as Mai (voice)
Lines written to be spoken, staged so the pauses do half the work.
Most underrated film
Senpai Is an Otokonoko Movie: Sunshine After the Rain
as Girl (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 comedy
Bonnie Hunt
Built a career in the same territory: animation and comedy
Tom Wilkinson
Built a career in the same territory: comedy and drama
Matt Damon
Built a career in the same territory: drama and fantasy
Tim Allen
Built a career in the same territory: animation and comedy
Joan Cusack
Built a career in the same territory: animation and comedy
Have your say
Community
Which Saya Hitomi 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
