Performer
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio rank
#2221
of 909177 performers
Top 1%
Taiten Kusunoki 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.
Taiten Kusunoki appears in 6 films in the Nutevio catalogue, and none of them would work the same way without Taiten. Her Blue Sky 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, science fiction, drama. It is a style built on what is withheld as much as what is played.
Working with Mitsuo Fukuda, Chika Nagaoka, Hiroshi Ikehata and others, Taiten Kusunoki 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.
Her Blue Sky (2019) as Dankichi Band's Trumpet Player (voice) · Promare (2019) as Vulcan Haestus (voice) · Mobile Suit Gundam SEED FREEDOM (2024) as Herbert Von Reinhard (voice)
Career snapshot
Ranked #2221 of 909177 performers tracked in the Nutevio library.
Films in Nutevio
6
2019–2024
Career length
5 yrs
Measured across our catalogue
Academy Awards
—
Unknown
Oscar nominations
—
Unknown
Highest Nutevio score
7.4
Her Blue Sky
Average Nutevio score
7.0
Across catalogue work
Highest IMDb rating
7.4
Her Blue Sky
Most frequent director
Mitsuo Fukuda
1 film together
Longest collaboration
1×
With Mitsuo Fukuda
Most common genre
Animation
6 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
7.0
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
6.4
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
7.1 average MV
The 2010s are where the work and the material meet. Promare, Her Blue Sky, Promare / Side: Lio — the run our editors reach for first when the argument is about range rather than fame.
Highest average Nutevio score
2010s
7.1
Across 3 catalogue films in this decade, our scores never drop below the level a career is judged on.
Highest average IMDb rating
2010s
7.1
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. Promare, Her Blue Sky, Promare / Side: Lio.
Most productive era
2010s
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 | 2010s | 2020s |
|---|---|---|
| Drama | — | 7.02 films |
| Action | 7.02 films | 6.83 films |
| Thriller | — | 6.51 film |
| Crime | — | 6.51 film |
| Romance | 7.41 film | 6.51 film |
| Horror | — | 7.01 film |
Chronology
Firsts and peaks
The turning points, in the order they happened.
First film in Nutevio
2019Promare
Where our catalogue meets this career, as Vulcan Haestus (voice).
Highest rated performance · Career peak
2019Her Blue Sky
7.4 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
2024Mobile Suit Gundam SEED FREEDOM
The current state of the argument, as Herbert Von Reinhard (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.
6 of 6 films
as Dankichi Band's Trumpet Player (voice)
Directed by Tatsuyuki Nagai
as Vulcan Haestus (voice)
Directed by Tatsumi Fujii
as Vulcan Haestus (voice)
Directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi
as Herbert Von Reinhard (voice)
Directed by Mitsuo Fukuda
as 18th Section Chief (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.
Loading credits…
The defining work
#1
Dankichi Band's Trumpet Player (voice)
Her Blue Sky (2019)
Performance score7.2
The performance the rest of the career is read through. Dankichi Band's Trumpet Player (voice) gives Taiten Kusunoki a structure to work against, and the film hands over its centre of gravity without hesitation.
View movie#2
Vulcan Haestus (voice)
Promare / Side: Lio (2019)
Performance score7.1
Promare / Side: Lio asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Vulcan Haestus (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#3
Vulcan Haestus (voice)
Promare (2019)
Performance score7.0
Promare asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Vulcan Haestus (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#4
Herbert Von Reinhard (voice)
Mobile Suit Gundam SEED FREEDOM (2024)
Performance score6.9
Mobile Suit Gundam SEED FREEDOM asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Herbert Von Reinhard (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 Dankichi Band's Trumpet Player (voice)
Start here. Her Blue Sky is the clearest statement of what Taiten Kusunoki does — accessible, 108 minutes, and rated 7.4 by our editors. No context required.
Our editors order this path by accessibility first and chronology second. You meet Taiten 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.
Promare / Side: Lio (2019)
Keeps the animation register of Her Blue Sky but asks for a colder reading of it.
Promare (2019)
Keeps the action register of Promare / Side: Lio but asks for a colder reading of it.
BEM: BECOME HUMAN (2020)
Keeps the action register of Promare but asks for a colder reading of it.
Mobile Suit Gundam SEED FREEDOM (2024)
Keeps the action register of BEM: BECOME HUMAN but asks for a colder reading of it.
Company kept
The directors and performers this career keeps returning to.
Tatsumi Fujii
Director
1 film together
Notably Promare / Side: Lio
Tatsuyuki Nagai
Director
1 film together
Notably Her Blue Sky
Hiroyuki Imaishi
Director
1 film together
Notably Promare
Hiroshi Ikehata
Director
1 film together
Notably BEM: BECOME HUMAN
Chika Nagaoka
Director
1 film together
Notably Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet
Mitsuo Fukuda
Director
1 film together
Notably Mobile Suit Gundam SEED FREEDOM
Behind the camera
Who casts this performer, how often, and what the pairing produces.
Tatsuyuki Nagai
Director
1 film together · 7.4 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Her Blue SkyHiroyuki Imaishi
Director
1 film together · 7.1 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
PromareMitsuo Fukuda
Director
1 film together · 7.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Mobile Suit Gundam SEED FREEDOMHiroshi 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 HUMANTatsumi Fujii
Director
1 film together · 6.9 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Promare / Side: LioChika Nagaoka
Director
1 film together · 6.5 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Detective Conan: The Scarlet BulletSix 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
Her Blue Sky
as Dankichi Band's Trumpet Player (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
Her Blue Sky
as Dankichi Band's Trumpet Player (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
Her Blue Sky
as Dankichi Band's Trumpet Player (voice)
You can hear this reading in other actors' auditions a decade later — the surest measure of influence there is.
Best ensemble performance
Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet
as John Voit (voice)
Work that makes everyone else in the frame better without ever pulling the camera towards itself.
Career defining performance
Her Blue Sky
as Dankichi Band's Trumpet Player (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. Taiten Kusunoki 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
6 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
Her Blue Sky
as Dankichi Band's Trumpet Player (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 18th Section Chief (voice)
A first sequence that states the rules of the film without explaining a single one of them.
Most emotional
Her Blue Sky
as Dankichi Band's Trumpet Player (voice)
The film where the technique steps aside and lets the feeling arrive undefended.
Best twist
Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet
as John Voit (voice)
A reversal earned by information the film gave you and trusted you to misread.
Best visual achievement
Promare
as Vulcan Haestus (voice)
Images that would survive with the sound switched off.
Best action sequence
Mobile Suit Gundam SEED FREEDOM
as Herbert Von Reinhard (voice)
Geography, stakes and consequence held in the same frame — spectacle you can follow.
Best dialogue
Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet
as John Voit (voice)
Lines written to be spoken, staged so the pauses do half the work.
Most underrated film
Promare
as Vulcan Haestus (voice)
The public vote sits below ours on this one, and the direction is the reason for the gap.
If you like this performer
Michael Caine
Built a career in the same territory: drama and thriller
Morgan Freeman
Built a career in the same territory: action and crime
Matt Damon
Built a career in the same territory: drama and fantasy
Christian Bale
Built a career in the same territory: action and crime
Tom Hanks
Built a career in the same territory: animation and drama
Bonnie Hunt
Built a career in the same territory: animation and drama
Have your say
Community
Which Taiten Kusunoki 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
