Performer
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio rank
#7732
of 909177 performers
Top 1%
Shuntaro Yanagi 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.
Shuntaro Yanagi appears in 12 films in the Nutevio catalogue, and none of them would work the same way without Shuntaro. Rurouni Kenshin: The Final is the clearest case: a film rated 7.3 by our editors, where the performance carries weight the script only implies.
The recognisable elements are versatility, transformation, quiet performance. 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 Kenji Katagiri, Nobuhiro Doi, Shigeaki Kubo and others, Shuntaro Yanagi 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.
Rurouni Kenshin: The Final (2021) as Hyoko Otowa · Love Like the Falling Petals (2022) as Kenzo Takanashi · Golden Kamuy -The Abashiri Prison Raid- (2026) as Kohei Nikaido
Career snapshot
Ranked #7732 of 909177 performers tracked in the Nutevio library.
Films in Nutevio
12
2017–2026
Career length
9 yrs
Measured across our catalogue
Academy Awards
—
Unknown
Oscar nominations
—
Unknown
Highest Nutevio score
7.3
Rurouni Kenshin: The Final
Average Nutevio score
6.6
Across catalogue work
Highest IMDb rating
8.0
Love Like the Falling Petals
Most frequent director
Kenji Katagiri
1 film together
Longest collaboration
1×
With Kenji Katagiri
Most common genre
Drama
7 titles
Average runtime
1h 58m
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
6.3
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
6.7 average MV
The 2020s are where the work and the material meet. Golden Kamuy -The Abashiri Prison Raid-, A Moon in the Ordinary, Golden Kamuy — the run our editors reach for first when the argument is about range rather than fame.
Highest average Nutevio score
2020s
6.7
Across 8 catalogue films in this decade, our scores never drop below the level a career is judged on.
Highest average IMDb rating
2020s
7.2
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. The Witness, My Father, the Bride, Tokyo Ghoul 'S'.
Most productive era
2020s
8 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 | 6.42 films | 6.85 films |
| Action | 6.62 films | 6.93 films |
| Thriller | 6.72 films | 6.61 film |
| Comedy | 6.11 film | 6.53 films |
| Crime | 6.51 film | — |
| Romance | — | 6.82 films |
| Horror | 6.41 film | 6.52 films |
Chronology
Firsts and peaks
The turning points, in the order they happened.
First film in Nutevio
2017Tokyo Ghoul
Where our catalogue meets this career, as Renji Yomo.
Highest rated performance · Career peak
2021Rurouni Kenshin: The Final
7.3 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
2026Golden Kamuy -The Abashiri Prison Raid-
The current state of the argument, as Kohei Nikaido.
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.
12 of 12 films
as Kenzo Takanashi
Directed by Yoshihiro Fukagawa
as Hyoko Otowa
Directed by Unknown
as Kohei Nikaido
Directed by Kenji Katagiri
as Yohei Nikaido / Kohei Nikaido
Directed by Shigeaki Kubo
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
Kenzo Takanashi
Love Like the Falling Petals (2022)
Performance score7.2
The performance the rest of the career is read through. Kenzo Takanashi gives Shuntaro Yanagi a structure to work against, and the film hands over its centre of gravity without hesitation.
View movie#2
Hyoko Otowa
Rurouni Kenshin: The Final (2021)
Performance score7.2
Rurouni Kenshin: The Final asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Hyoko Otowa is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#3
Kohei Nikaido
Golden Kamuy -The Abashiri Prison Raid- (2026)
Performance score7.0
Golden Kamuy -The Abashiri Prison Raid- asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Kohei Nikaido is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#4
Kenichiro Ryuzaki
Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead (2023)
Performance score7.0
Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Kenichiro Ryuzaki 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 Kenzo Takanashi
Start here. Love Like the Falling Petals is the clearest statement of what Shuntaro Yanagi does — accessible, 128 minutes, and rated 7.1 by our editors. No context required.
Our editors order this path by accessibility first and chronology second. You meet Shuntaro 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.
Rurouni Kenshin: The Final (2021)
Keeps the drama register of Love Like the Falling Petals but asks for a colder reading of it.
Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead (2023)
Same director as Rurouni Kenshin: The Final, different problem to solve. Watching them in order shows how much of the effect was the collaboration.
Golden Kamuy (2024)
Keeps the comedy register of Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead but asks for a colder reading of it.
Golden Kamuy -The Abashiri Prison Raid- (2026)
Keeps the action register of Golden Kamuy but asks for a colder reading of it.
Company kept
The directors and performers this career keeps returning to.
Junichi Mori
Director
1 film together
Notably The Witness
Yoshihiro Fukagawa
Director
1 film together
Notably Love Like the Falling Petals
Eiichiro Hasumi
Director
1 film together
Notably Re/Member
Shigeaki Kubo
Director
1 film together
Notably Golden Kamuy
Nobuhiro Doi
Director
1 film together
Notably A Moon in the Ordinary
Kenji Katagiri
Director
1 film together
Notably Golden Kamuy -The Abashiri Prison Raid-
Behind the camera
Who casts this performer, how often, and what the pairing produces.
Yoshihiro Fukagawa
Director
1 film together · 7.1 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Love Like the Falling PetalsKenji Katagiri
Director
1 film together · 6.8 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Golden Kamuy -The Abashiri Prison Raid-Shigeaki Kubo
Director
1 film together · 6.7 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Golden KamuyNobuhiro Doi
Director
1 film together · 6.6 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
A Moon in the OrdinaryEiichiro Hasumi
Director
1 film together · 6.6 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Re/MemberJunichi Mori
Director
1 film together · 6.5 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
The WitnessSix 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
Rurouni Kenshin: The Final
as Hyoko Otowa
The one that survives a fourth viewing. Nothing in the performance depends on surprise, which is why it keeps paying out.
Most emotional performance
Love Like the Falling Petals
as Kenzo Takanashi
Grief played at conversational volume. The film never asks the audience to cry; the performance simply makes it difficult not to.
Most influential performance
Rurouni Kenshin: The Final
as Hyoko Otowa
You can hear this reading in other actors' auditions a decade later — the surest measure of influence there is.
Best ensemble performance
Rurouni Kenshin: The Final
as Hyoko Otowa
Work that makes everyone else in the frame better without ever pulling the camera towards itself.
Career defining performance
Love Like the Falling Petals
as Kenzo Takanashi
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. Shuntaro Yanagi 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.
Drama Legend
Awarded
7 catalogue titles in drama, 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
Rurouni Kenshin: The Final
as Hyoko Otowa
The last five minutes reorganise everything before them, and hold up when you already know what's coming.
Best opening
Re/Member
A first sequence that states the rules of the film without explaining a single one of them.
Most emotional
A Moon in the Ordinary
The film where the technique steps aside and lets the feeling arrive undefended.
Best twist
The Witness
as Keiichi Kirino
A reversal earned by information the film gave you and trusted you to misread.
Best visual achievement
Rurouni Kenshin: The Final
as Hyoko Otowa
Images that would survive with the sound switched off.
Best action sequence
Golden Kamuy -The Abashiri Prison Raid-
as Kohei Nikaido
Geography, stakes and consequence held in the same frame — spectacle you can follow.
Best dialogue
Rurouni Kenshin: The Final
as Hyoko Otowa
Lines written to be spoken, staged so the pauses do half the work.
Most underrated film
My Father, the Bride
as Ebio
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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