Performer
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio rank
#1962
of 909177 performers
Top 1%
Chiaki Kobayashi 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.
Chiaki Kobayashi appears in 5 films in the Nutevio catalogue, and none of them would work the same way without Chiaki. A Love Too Captivating is the clearest case: a film rated 7.8 by our editors, where the performance carries weight the script only implies.
The recognisable elements are quiet performance, drama, emotional range. Watch two of these films back to back and the method separates from the material — the same instrument, tuned differently for romance, animation, action. It is a style built on what is withheld as much as what is played.
Working with Hiro Kaburagi, Kyohei Ishiguro, Tomonori Sudo, Chiaki 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.
A Love Too Captivating (2025) as Aoha Mizusu (voice) · Summer Ghost (2021) as Tomoya Sugisaki (voice) · Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop (2021) as (voice)
Career snapshot
Ranked #1962 of 909177 performers tracked in the Nutevio library.
Films in Nutevio
5
2019–2025
Career length
6 yrs
Measured across our catalogue
Academy Awards
—
Unknown
Oscar nominations
—
Unknown
Highest Nutevio score
7.8
A Love Too Captivating
Average Nutevio score
7.2
Across catalogue work
Highest IMDb rating
7.8
A Love Too Captivating
Most frequent director
Hiro Kaburagi
1 film together
Longest collaboration
1×
With Hiro Kaburagi
Most common genre
Animation
5 titles
Average runtime
1h 9m
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
6.5
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
7.3 average MV
The 2020s are where the work and the material meet. A Love Too Captivating, GREAT PRETENDER razbliuto, Summer Ghost — the run our editors reach for first when the argument is about range rather than fame.
Highest average Nutevio score
2020s
7.3
Across 4 catalogue films in this decade, our scores never drop below the level a career is judged on.
Highest average IMDb rating
2020s
7.3
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. Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel II. Lost Butterfly.
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 | 2010s | 2020s |
|---|---|---|
| Drama | 7.01 film | 7.32 films |
| Action | 7.01 film | 6.61 film |
| Crime | — | 6.61 film |
| Romance | 7.01 film | 7.52 films |
Chronology
Firsts and peaks
The turning points, in the order they happened.
First film in Nutevio
2019Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel II. Lost Butterfly
Where our catalogue meets this career, as (voice).
Highest rated performance · Career peak · Most recent film
7.8 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. The current state of the argument, as Aoha Mizusu (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.
5 of 5 films
as Aoha Mizusu (voice)
Directed by Unknown
as Tomoya Sugisaki (voice)
Directed by Unknown
as (voice)
Directed by Kyohei Ishiguro
as (voice)
Directed by Tomonori Sudo
as Makoto 'Edamame' Edamura (voice)
Directed by Hiro Kaburagi
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
Aoha Mizusu (voice)
A Love Too Captivating (2025)
Performance score8.3
The performance the rest of the career is read through. Aoha Mizusu (voice) gives Chiaki Kobayashi a structure to work against, and the film hands over its centre of gravity without hesitation.
View movie#2
Tomoya Sugisaki (voice)
Summer Ghost (2021)
Performance score7.9
Summer Ghost asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Tomoya Sugisaki (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#3
(voice)
Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop (2021)
Performance score7.2
Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop 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)
Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel II. Lost Butterfly (2019)
Performance score6.9
Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel II. Lost Butterfly 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 Aoha Mizusu (voice)
Start here. A Love Too Captivating is the clearest statement of what Chiaki Kobayashi does — accessible, 13 minutes, and rated 7.8 by our editors. No context required.
Our editors order this path by accessibility first and chronology second. You meet Chiaki 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.
Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel II. Lost Butterfly (2019)
Keeps the romance register of A Love Too Captivating but asks for a colder reading of it.
Summer Ghost (2021)
Keeps the fantasy register of Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel II. Lost Butterfly but asks for a colder reading of it.
Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop (2021)
Keeps the drama register of Summer Ghost but asks for a colder reading of it.
GREAT PRETENDER razbliuto (2024)
Keeps the animation register of Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop but asks for a colder reading of it.
Company kept
The directors and performers this career keeps returning to.
Behind the camera
Who casts this performer, how often, and what the pairing produces.
Kyohei Ishiguro
Director
1 film together · 7.3 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Words Bubble Up Like Soda PopTomonori Sudo
Director
1 film together · 7.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel II. Lost ButterflyHiro Kaburagi
Director
1 film together · 6.6 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
GREAT PRETENDER razbliutoSix 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
Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel II. Lost Butterfly
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
A Love Too Captivating
as Aoha Mizusu (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
A Love Too Captivating
as Aoha Mizusu (voice)
You can hear this reading in other actors' auditions a decade later — the surest measure of influence there is.
Best ensemble performance
Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop
as (voice)
Work that makes everyone else in the frame better without ever pulling the camera towards itself.
Career defining performance
A Love Too Captivating
as Aoha Mizusu (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. Chiaki 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.
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
5 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
Summer Ghost
as Tomoya Sugisaki (voice)
The last five minutes reorganise everything before them, and hold up when you already know what's coming.
Best opening
Summer Ghost
as Tomoya Sugisaki (voice)
A first sequence that states the rules of the film without explaining a single one of them.
Most emotional
A Love Too Captivating
as Aoha Mizusu (voice)
The film where the technique steps aside and lets the feeling arrive undefended.
Best twist
Summer Ghost
as Tomoya Sugisaki (voice)
A reversal earned by information the film gave you and trusted you to misread.
Best visual achievement
A Love Too Captivating
as Aoha Mizusu (voice)
Images that would survive with the sound switched off.
Best action sequence
GREAT PRETENDER razbliuto
as Makoto 'Edamame' Edamura (voice)
Geography, stakes and consequence held in the same frame — spectacle you can follow.
Best dialogue
Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop
as (voice)
Lines written to be spoken, staged so the pauses do half the work.
Most underrated film
Summer Ghost
as Tomoya Sugisaki (voice)
The public vote sits below ours on this one, and the direction is the reason for the gap.
If you like this performer
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Bonnie Hunt
Built a career in the same territory: animation and drama
Morgan Freeman
Built a career in the same territory: action and crime
Mark Ruffalo
Built a career in the same territory: crime and mystery
Matt Damon
Built a career in the same territory: drama and fantasy
Have your say
Community
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Reference
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