Performer
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio rank
#3284
of 909177 performers
Top 1%
Kisho Taniyama represents the rare performer whose career became more ambitious with every decade — 26 years in, and Kisho is still choosing the harder script.
The essay
Our editors on the work, the patterns and the reason this body of work holds together.
Kisho Taniyama appears in 7 films in the Nutevio catalogue, and none of them would work the same way without Kisho. Perfect Blue is the clearest case: a film rated 8.2 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, adventure, drama. It is a style built on what is withheld as much as what is played.
Working with Yuichiro Hayashi, Hiroyuki Kato, Koichi Sakamoto and others, Kisho Taniyama 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.
Perfect Blue (1998) as Blue (voice) · Attack on Titan: THE LAST ATTACK (2024) as Jean Kirstein (voice) · Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple (2018) as Chuuya Nakahara (voice)
Career snapshot
Ranked #3284 of 909177 performers tracked in the Nutevio library.
Films in Nutevio
7
1998–2024
Career length
26 yrs
Measured across our catalogue
Academy Awards
—
Unknown
Oscar nominations
—
Unknown
Highest Nutevio score
8.2
Perfect Blue
Average Nutevio score
7.0
Across catalogue work
Highest IMDb rating
10.0
Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger vs. Donbrothers
Most frequent director
Yuichiro Hayashi
1 film together
Longest collaboration
1×
With Yuichiro Hayashi
Most common genre
Animation
5 titles
Average runtime
1h 16m
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
6.7
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
1990s
8.2 average MV
The 1990s are where the work and the material meet. Perfect Blue — the run our editors reach for first when the argument is about range rather than fame.
Highest average Nutevio score
1990s
8.2
Across 1 catalogue film in this decade, our scores never drop below the level a career is judged on.
Highest average IMDb rating
1990s
8.3
The public agrees most strongly about this stretch — useful context, and occasionally a decade behind our own reading.
Most awarded era
1990s
0 Academy Awards
Statuettes for the films themselves, which is the honest way to read an ensemble career. Perfect Blue.
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 | 1990s | 2010s | 2020s |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drama | — | — | 7.71 film |
| Action | — | 7.41 film | 7.03 films |
| Thriller | 8.21 film | — | — |
| Comedy | — | 7.41 film | — |
| Romance | — | 6.31 film | — |
Chronology
Firsts and peaks
The turning points, in the order they happened.
First film in Nutevio · Highest rated performance · Career peak
1998Perfect Blue
Where our catalogue meets this career, as Blue (voice). 8.2 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
2024Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger vs. Kyoryuger
The current state of the argument, as OhgerCalibur (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 Blue (voice)
Directed by Satoshi Kon
as Chuuya Nakahara (voice)
Directed by Takuya Igarashi
as Jean Kirstein (voice)
Directed by Yuichiro Hayashi
as OhgerCalibur (Voice)
Directed by Hiroyuki Kato
as OhgerCalibur (Voice)
Directed by Koichi Sakamoto
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
Blue (voice)
Perfect Blue (1998)
Performance score7.9
The performance the rest of the career is read through. Blue (voice) gives Kisho Taniyama a structure to work against, and the film hands over its centre of gravity without hesitation.
View movie#2
Chuuya Nakahara (voice)
Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple (2018)
Performance score7.7
Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Chuuya Nakahara (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#3
Jean Kirstein (voice)
Attack on Titan: THE LAST ATTACK (2024)
Performance score7.5
Attack on Titan: THE LAST ATTACK asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Jean Kirstein (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#4
OhgerCalibur (Voice)
Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger vs. Donbrothers (2024)
Performance score6.6
Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger vs. Donbrothers asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. OhgerCalibur (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 Blue (voice)
Start here. Perfect Blue is the clearest statement of what Kisho Taniyama does — accessible, 81 minutes, and rated 8.2 by our editors. No context required.
Our editors order this path by accessibility first and chronology second. You meet Kisho 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.
Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple (2018)
Keeps the animation register of Perfect Blue but asks for a colder reading of it.
Attack on Titan: THE LAST ATTACK (2024)
Keeps the action register of Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple but asks for a colder reading of it.
Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger vs. Donbrothers (2024)
Keeps the action register of Attack on Titan: THE LAST ATTACK but asks for a colder reading of it.
Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger vs. Kyoryuger (2024)
Keeps the action register of Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger vs. Donbrothers but asks for a colder reading of it.
Company kept
The directors and performers this career keeps returning to.
Satoshi Kon
Director
1 film together
Notably Perfect Blue
Takuya Igarashi
Director
1 film together
Notably Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple
Jouji Furuta
Director
1 film together
Notably Utano Princesama Maji LOVE Kingdom
Chika Nagaoka
Director
1 film together
Notably Uta no Prince-sama Maji LOVE Starish Tours
Koichi Sakamoto
Director
1 film together
Notably Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger vs. Kyoryuger
Hiroyuki Kato
Director
1 film together
Notably Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger vs. Donbrothers
Yuichiro Hayashi
Director
1 film together
Notably Attack on Titan: THE LAST ATTACK
Behind the camera
Who casts this performer, how often, and what the pairing produces.
Satoshi Kon
Director
1 film together · 8.2 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Perfect BlueYuichiro Hayashi
Director
1 film together · 7.7 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Attack on Titan: THE LAST ATTACKTakuya Igarashi
Director
1 film together · 7.4 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead AppleHiroyuki Kato
Director
1 film together · 6.7 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger vs. DonbrothersKoichi Sakamoto
Director
1 film together · 6.5 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger vs. KyoryugerJouji Furuta
Director
1 film together · 6.3 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Utano Princesama Maji LOVE KingdomChika Nagaoka
Director
1 film together · 6.2 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Uta no Prince-sama Maji LOVE Starish ToursSix 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
Attack on Titan: THE LAST ATTACK
as Jean Kirstein (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
Utano Princesama Maji LOVE Kingdom
as Natsuki Shinomiya (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
Perfect Blue
as Blue (voice)
You can hear this reading in other actors' auditions a decade later — the surest measure of influence there is.
Best ensemble performance
Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger vs. Kyoryuger
as OhgerCalibur (Voice)
Work that makes everyone else in the frame better without ever pulling the camera towards itself.
Career defining performance
Perfect Blue
as Blue (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. Kisho Taniyama 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.
Career Achievement
Awarded
26 years of relevant work — not merely a long career, but a long career of choices.
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
Perfect Blue
as Blue (voice)
The last five minutes reorganise everything before them, and hold up when you already know what's coming.
Best opening
Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple
as Chuuya Nakahara (voice)
A first sequence that states the rules of the film without explaining a single one of them.
Most emotional
Uta no Prince-sama Maji LOVE Starish Tours
as Natsuki Shinomiya (voice)
The film where the technique steps aside and lets the feeling arrive undefended.
Best twist
Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple
as Chuuya Nakahara (voice)
A reversal earned by information the film gave you and trusted you to misread.
Best visual achievement
Attack on Titan: THE LAST ATTACK
as Jean Kirstein (voice)
Images that would survive with the sound switched off.
Best action sequence
Attack on Titan: THE LAST ATTACK
as Jean Kirstein (voice)
Geography, stakes and consequence held in the same frame — spectacle you can follow.
Best dialogue
Attack on Titan: THE LAST ATTACK
as Jean Kirstein (voice)
Lines written to be spoken, staged so the pauses do half the work.
Most underrated film
Uta no Prince-sama Maji LOVE Starish Tours
as Natsuki Shinomiya (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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