The Pointless Ramblings of a Mizuki Nana Fan
Everyone knows I’m a Mizuki Nana fan. At least I hope everyone does… I rarely talk about it on the blog because I don’t want to sound like a drooling, broken record repeating ‘Nana Rules!’ ad nauseum. I tend not to extol her qualities as much as I would Inoue Marina or Kitamura Eri because there is already a massive Nana following on the internet – no need to preach to a group of people who have by and large already converted to Nana-worshipping, no?
Still, I’ve been thinking lately about my interest in Nana and Nana fandom in general. She’s obviously the most popular seiyuu idol around in Japan at the moment, and I’m happy with the success she’s achieved since her debut 8 years ago. I feel a violent urge to shout my support for Nana from my rooftop (except I probably shouldn’t, because the rain here has been pretty awful lately) and holler ‘Why on earth doesn’t Nana have a proper English fansite like Seki Tomokazu or Hirano Aya?’ So *hint*hint* someone with more time on their hands, please set one up.
Anyway, I’m going to spend the next couple of paragraphs talking crap – it’s not going to be very coherent, thinking of Nana tends to make me dribble like a leaky tap. If you’re a Nana fan you can proceed, if you’re not a Nana fan, あっち行け。
In The Beginning
My first Nana experience (crap, it’s not supposed to sound like a sexual encounter -_-) was Happy Lesson OVA, quickly followed by Sister Princess. I enjoyed neither show, and I was especially irritated by Aria/Nana’s sing-song voice (altogether now, nii~~ya~~bleurgh).
At that point in time (sometime at the start of 2002) I’d heard the odd Nana song here and there (Hana,Hoshi,Sora from Shaman King, Yuuyakegumo no Mukou ni from Happy Lesson etc) but nothing really impressed me. Worst of all was Heaven Knows, a song that still makes me gag to this day for its chorus’ similarity to the horrible 80s crap that was Flashdance. Hate it hate it hate it x2000.
It was POWER GATE that changed my opinion 180 degrees, and PROTECTION that sealed it. It was like a hurricane hitting me in the face, that was how powerful I realised Nana’s voice was. That pair of songs is what makes MAGIC ATTRACTION my favourite Nana album til today.
Voice Work
Even now Nana’s voice work is largely irrelevant to me, I can’t even tell you what her best role is; as far as I’m concerned it’s just a side show to her music career. Nana could be voicing plastic trees for all I care, as long as she continues releasing the music I don’t care. Ah well, I guess Fate must be Nana’s best role, though if push came to shove, I’d try to make a case for Kirihara Misaki (from Darker Than Black)…I guess I just wanted an excuse to put up that pic of Nana & Yukarin together >_> Oh, and I’m sure the character that most gaijin would recognise on her CV is Hyuga Hinata from Naruto. Yawn.
The Path to Becoming The No.1 Seiyuu Idol…
…is fraught with crap sales & virtual rotten eggs. And bad clothes (WTF is she wearing in the pic above), awful hairstyles and embarassing pictures. POWER GATE, which would be many fans’ favourite Nana song managed to sell a mind-blowing 3,430 copies. It wasn’t until innocent starter that things really took off for her (I’ll detail that later on) and it’s been onwards and upwards since then.
So why does Nana have such a strong fanbase, one that ensures her CDs, DVDs and live shows sell by the bucketloads, breaking all sorts of sales records along the way? Cos she (and her management) knows what sells and who buys her stuff. Nana may love singing enka but nobody on planet Nihon would buy it unless she was black like Jero or good looking like Hikawa Kiyoshi. She appeals to her fans by sticking to doing the stuff she knows will shift CDs. So no doing stupid variety shows that nobody watches, no dabbling in gravure or showing off your stupid ugly legs.
And Nana is bloody good live – one of the best performers not just in anime music but in the whole Japanese music scene. Those are the two things that have defined her career – great songs and great live performances. If anyone else wants to become a mega-seiyuu idol, they’d do well to follow Nana’s template – Chihara Minori is doing a good job so far.
Visual Appeal
To me? Non, Nein, No. Well, not really anyway. Nana’s gotten erm…more appealing over the years but her looks were never something that interested me. I think it was the teeth that bothered me in the first place, but once I got used to it it didn’t matter. Especially since my teeth are infinitely worse [hint: I've got inverted vampire teeth]. I’m quite sure visual appeal is not the main reason Nana appeals to most of her fans either.
The Music
I tend to lean towards Nana’s more upbeat stuff, particularly the dance numbers with harder beats. Probably because I approached anime music from a Jpop point of view & the BoA/Hamasaki Ayumi sound was all the vogue at the time.
The great thing about Nana’s music is how much it’s evolved and changed over the course of 8 years – whoever decided to change her production team from Yabuki Toshiro to Elements Garden deserves a huge pat on the back. It gave her an entirely new, more modern sound to keep in step with what was popular in mainstream Jpop. This creates enough diversity in her sizeable back catalogue to cater for all sorts of tastes – I’m pretty sure if you went out and asked 50 Nana fans at random what their top 10 Nana songs were, you’d come up with 50 different lists.
Running through the Nana library
I’ve listed my Top 5 somwehere before, but I’ll run down what else would make it into an extended 20 (I believe there are easily more than 200 Nana songs, including character stuff etc). Since I’ve been following Nana’s musical career for about 6 years now I tend to be overly nostalgic about songs that I heard earlier on. There was a period when I was stuck in boarding school in the UK without an internet connection; that’s when I’d listen to stuff from people like Okazaki Ritsuko, Nana and Okui Masami on repeat and became almost addicted to them, and it’s the songs from these years (2002-2004) that have stayed closest to my heart.
Personal Top 20
20.still in the groove
19.Crystal Letter
18.Independent Love Song
17.Naked Feels
16.WILD EYES
15.Panorama
14.Nocturne-revision-
13.Nostalgia
12.cherish
11.Faith
10.Ano Hi Yume Mita Negai – It’s understandable why Nana doesn’t sing that many ballads, but when she does do them the results can be spectacular. Everytime I watch the live performance of this on the Rainbow tour I feel like sobbing ;_; And the live studio version that came with THE MUSEUM DVD T_T Yep, I’m just a softie at heart…
09.Mirai Kono Hoshi de – I’m pretty sure this won’t make it onto anybody else’s top 10 list. It’s a song from the PS2 Natsuiro no Sunadokei game, again from the 02-03 period. Strangely, when I first got hold of (OK, I downloaded it) the song it was labeled ‘I’ve’ or KOTOKO or something but the instant I heard it I knew it was Nana. This song has a pretty awful arrangement when I listen to it now, but it seemed typical of the Memories Off-type songs that I used to love.
08.Hime Murasaki – As lovely as the sight of Nana wearing black leather is (see WILD EYES PV), it was always Hime Murasaki that held my attention. It’s a bit of a departure from the norm for her, being a slow-burning rock ballad and at the far end of the spectrum from her usual high-octane dance songs. Her vocal on this is sublime, and watching the performance of the song at Animelo ‘06 still sends shivers down my spine.
07.Heart-shaped chant – I still can’t believe that my first reaction upon hearing this was one of meh, this is boring. I blame it on the fact that I was listening to the song via Peercast via AM radio, hence its suckiness. I’m sure HSC would rank highly on many people’s lists. Epic would be the word to describe the song. It starts off all slow with that heavenly harp in the background and then gradually building up with the strings to a climax – around the 4:30 mark lies the sound of pure heaven.
06.innocent starter – This song was something of a turning point for Nana’s seiyuu idol career – it was her first single that charted within the Oricon top 10, the first to spend more than 5 weeks in the charts, the first to sell more than 20,000 copies. Coupled with the popularity of the Nanoha franchise, innocent starter brought her infinitely more fans that she probably imagined she could’ve had. It was from here on that I suppose the gaijin love for Nana truly exploded, and I for one am glad. What’s so great about innocent starter then? For me it’s that guitar solo at the end – every time I hear it a wave of nostalgia rushes over me. Don’t ask why, I can’t explain.
05.Replay Machine -custom- -The custom mix of Replay Machine is one of the few times I listen to a song and think ‘What a difference an arrangement makes!’ The original mix of the song is dreadful, like something somebody recorded in their bedroom in the 80s but this version on the other hand, is just fantastic. It adds shape and power to a song that once sounded like Nana had sung it buried under twenty feet of sand with a clothes peg on her nose.
04.Inside of mind – I am pretty tolerant of Engrish, mainly because I’m not really one for listening to lyrics (cos I can’t sing). I still have no clue what the heck Nana is singing in the chorus but I don’t care. The pulsating electronic beats make this the perfect iPod head-bopping song. I hated ETERNAL BLAZE when it first came out, but having Inside of mind as a c/w song made the single a million times more palatable.
03.Tears’ Night – Tsuyoku tsuyoku yada yada yada. This was the song that heralded Nana’s march forward into the epic orchestral stuff that she puts out these days – it was her first collaboration with Agematsu Noriyasu, the mastermind behind Elements Garden. The best song on ALIVE & KICKING by a country mile, Tears’ Night is best heard live. I’d like to dance along to it but I’ve got two left feet (along with two left brains).
02.POWER GATE – Can’t quite imagine how PG would not make Nana fans’ top 10 lists. It’s the first song I skip to on every live DVD, and it’s the only Nana song that I know at least half the lyrics to -_- Just so that I can shout On The Street! along with the rest of the crowd >_> Like Tears’ Night, POWER GATE is best appreciated live.
01.PROTECTION – Very much a sentimental favourite of mine. It was listening to PROTECTION when it first hit me that Nana had this powerfully crazy vibrato that she could seemingly control and bend at will. It was even more surprising that I wasn’t hearing it in an enka song and that had me scrambling for the rewind button just to replay those bits again. It’s a very old school Jpop song that I don’t think the new generation of Nana fans will appreciate quite so much, but hearing this back in 2002 I was all like ‘Crap. Not all anime-related songs sound like they’ve had bubblegum injected into them after all!’ The chorus still gets me every time, damnit.
On the flipside, 5 Nana songs I would rather not hear ever again:
1.Ano Ne~Mamimume☆Mogacho
2.Heaven Knows
3.COSMIC LOVE
4.TRY AGAIN
5.NANAiro no Youni
They all suck. I’d rather not waste my breath explaining why. I’d just prefer to listen to non-stop polka music than to hear those 5 songs listed above.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my 10-minutes worth of rabid fangirling. I don’t know why the heck I decided to go on a verbal rampage, bombarding everyone within 10 yards with my ‘Nana rules!’ speech but at least I’m channelling my energy in a positive manner instead of running people down with trucks and knifing them.
You probably won’t see me rambling on like this ever again so savour the moment. Anyone else care to elaborate more on why they think Nana rocks their world? Oh, and you know what I’d like to do? A Nana profile – purely because it would require less effort as I’d just have to regurgitate all the info from somewhere deep in my internal organs.
Paraphrasing a comment by Julius Firefocht on the boob post – Planet Earth may get hit by a meteor, mankind might be obliterated by alien insects, pigs may fly and who knows, Tamura Yukari may one day grow older than 17 but one thing’s for sure – Nana will always rule the seiyuu idol world. My world too. All hail Queen Nana m(__)m
All hail Queen Nana! m(_ _)m
I actually want to make an English fansite for my goddess, and I’m sure I have all the time in the world during the coming holiday. But somehow I’m afraid I’ll screw it up ^^; seriously. I ended up updating her wiki like a freak during my classes thou >_>
But hey, what’s with the teeth? I think her smile is really sweet.. but I love her eyes the most. <3 <– I’m your very definition of “Nana-rules” broken record.
..Anyway, I like your top 10, except I’d rank Orchestral Fantasia somewhere there, and put Crystal Letter a bit higher. Blue Moon deserves a spot too in the top 20. Totally love PG and RM, might add Transmigration too. No comment for Inside of Mind – I’m totally biased with her live dance sequence for it.
..I want to list out why Nana rocks my world (literally), but it might be longer than your post. ^^;; Save it later after I finish my exam. NANA RULES!!
Edit: For her voice work, I think Allison might be her best. I loved every second I wasted in Princess Maker 4 too
Call me biased, but I actually couldn’t find major flaw in her voice works, although they’re not outstanding either – but she can pull off quite a range.. I’d rank her a bit above average.
..and she might want to get better anime/roles too (Tsuyokiss was crap). Damn, I should stop editing this.
OK, last edit, I agree on the bad clothes. WTF was she wearing on Animedia May-08? >_> I’d still dig it thou~ xD
All hail Queen Nana! XD
I simply adore her music, and she honestly knows how to totally get the audience worked up and deliver the most amazing performances in the world.
Speaking of voice roles… one that really impressed me was her Minami Touma from Minami-ke. I didn’t recognize her at first… THAT was pretty impressive.
I know I’ve only begun to dive into the world of Mizuki Nana, so as of now, I’m more interested in her career as a singer than a seiyuu. I’ve only heard 2 songs by her (Heart-Shaped Chant + Seishoujo Ryouiki from last year’s Animelo), but my favorite one right now is HSC, especially the Live Formula version.
Nana was what made me pay attention to seiyuu, and I “discovered” her thanks to a combination of Princess Tutu and Nanoha. I think it was when I learned that the person voicing both of those soft-spoken characters was also singing innocent starter was the moment when I became fascinated. Her performance as Ruu is still probably my favorite, but I’ve enjoyed her a lot as Toma and Kotoko as well. Maybe it’s just me, but I think I’ve seen more praise for her voice acting lately, usually focused on her role as Kotoko. And for favorite songs… Am I allowed to use her live duet with Masami Okuni?
I’m shocked that this is the only post under the “j1m0ne loses brain” category. Just kidding!
I’m not a huge fan of her singing, but I do love Nana-chan’s voice acting work. That, and she’s so adorable that it hurts. :O
@ Erin: Lol, completely forgot about Rue yday. Had too many crap to say. And can I say for the 14123th time it’s OKUI not OKUNI?
Whoops. *laughs* That’s what happens when I can’t remember names and don’t double-check.
95% of my posts should be under the ‘j1m0ne loses brain’ category actually >_> lol at the Okuni thing. It always makes me go “Masami Okuni (no) Okuni wa nanda?” (What is deep inside Okuni Masami?/What is Okuni Masami’s country?). Sorry, I don’t know what I’m talking about anymore.
Oh, and I’m not faulting Nana’s voice work. It’s just that she is almost always in shit shows that I never bother to watch. Though I do have to say Toma FTW! :3
Fine fine, here’s hoping I’ll put something together within the next year for nanamizuki.info
Setup minorichihara.com for kicks as well since I got in the mood.
I love you moy xD
I love you j1m0ne…
But I love Mizuki Nana more. haha
thanks for writing all that up! I’ll shout on the rooftop with you anyday
I think you should have a Mizuki Nana gallery on your next Mizuki Nana post
Along with being #1 on Google for “seiyuu breast size” you are now also #1 for “nana mizuki sexual encounter”
When I saw the title for this I had this massive surge of happiness. Great post, heres to more Nana-centric articles!
Na-ah
I like Yuna Ito
All hail Queen Nana!
I was pleased and surprised when I saw this post. Finally, an article devoted to Nana Mizuki by j1m0ne!
Like so many Nana-cons out there, I first knew about Nana through her work on the Nanoha series. Innocent Starter was such a nice song, with lyrics to match the storyline of the first season of Nanoha. Once I realized she wrote the lyrics, sang the song AND voiced Fate Testarossa, I was hooked and began hunting for any songs and anime that she worked on.
What I found only proved my suspicion that I might have inadvertantly stumbled on one of the biggest talent in the world of Japanese animation music. Kicking myself for not discovering her earlier, I continued to listen to her songs, tried to watch any anime that she starred in and continued to admire her music and talent. I was not a Nana-con yet at that point of time, and I had no idea just how well she could sing live.
That came some time later when I watched the DVD of one of her life performances and heard her belt out Innocent Starter live on stage.
Having seen the life performances of other seiyuus or even some mainstream J-pop singers, I had sadly grown to expect and live along with mediocre live performances and badly covered-up lip synching.
Nana-chan blew my world and my carefully constructed opinion apart and rebuilt it in her image, with her music. She proved to me that a singer, a seiyuu can and will perform well live, and in some cases it is entire possible for live versions of songs to be better than their CD recorded versions. In effect, Nana-chan gave me hope for live performances and made me much more open-minded to similar events held by other seiyuus such as Yukari Tamura.
I could never forget that moment. Her voice, soaring and confident, carrying my spirit along with her. My first response was overwhelming happiness, but as her performance ended and she finished her song, negativity filled my heart.
“Nah, its not possible. She sounds too good, easily comparable to the recorded version in the CD. She had to be lipsynching. She MUST be lipsynching.”
I rewatched her performance five times, observing her lip movement and closely listening to every syllable she sang before I convinced myself that she was not lipsynching, she was performing live and she was the real deal.
After that experience, I went out to lay my hands on any Nana-chan concert or event DVDs that I could find. Since then, I formally joined her legion of hardcore fans and pronounced myself a Nana-con, and had never looked back.
To Nana-chan’s immense credit, she had never let me down either. Her songs were always likeable to me, and there were no songs that I absolutely hated so much that I would never listen to it again after the first time. My only regret was that I was not along with Nana-chan for the entire span of her career. I like to think I am making up for lost time though. : )
_____
As for her visual appeal….
I have a poster of the first picture of Nana that j1m0ne used in this post pasted on my wall right now, as well as her few photobooks. Nana-chan is a plain-looking lady, make no mistakes about that. But for me, that is precisely what attracts me in the first place. In an age of packaged seiyuus that rely as much on looks as much as their voice (coughAyaHiranocough), Nana-chan comes off as natural and unassuming. Yes, she uses make-up like everyone else to doll herself up to look better, but she never had to go to extremes. And I do think she looks good, and can appeal to most people regardless of gender easily. Lookswise, she is perhaps one of the most down-to-Earth seiyuu idol around.
To me, the most distinguishing features about her has to be her eyes and her smile. When Nana-chan smiles, her eyes just light up. I get the urge to smile like an idiot whenever I see her smile. It’s contagious, somehow. And she smiles like she means it, unlike some artistes who can’t seem to convey any meaning in their smile. It’s not just a seiyuu problem, it’s an artiste problem. I have never felt any warmth from Ayumi Hamasaki’s smile, for example.
Oh, I almost forgot. Her legs. Nana-chan has great legs that her costume selecters seem very eager to show off. I almost spewed my coffee all over my keyboard when I first saw Nana-chan in her infamous pink maid costume in Summer Festa 2007. At that moment I realized that Nana-chan might not be as pretty as some of the other seiyuus out there(Noto Mamiko, Nakahara Mai, Hirano Aya), but she sure can be very cute when she wants to be! The camera happily panned up from her legs, and that was when I decided that Nana had some sure-kill weapons of her own that she can rely on when she needs to. Not bad. Not bad at all.
As I expected..this post is filled with Nana-chan’s fans enthusiastic comments lol. And I agree about not rambling much about Nana-chan because she already has a massive number of people blogging or discussing about her online. (Therefore I opt to drool at Hoc-chan instead XD). Personally I am also her fan but I tend to lean more to her songs only rather than voice acting. And yes, I love Power Gate very much. In fact, it’s ranked #2 by her jap fans during the Mizuki Nana 2007 summer festa show (with innocent starter topping the list). If innocent starter’s ending guitar solo is the one that attracted you to the song, for me it’s the beginning few notes from the keyboard…that few repetitive note gives me a powerful feeling.
I don’t care much about her visual appeal because I support her fully solely because of her music talent. I admire her very much for writing her own lyrics to songs like Eternal Blaze, Innocent Starters and so on. And if you watched the 2006 concert, you can really feel her powerful voice when she renders Takaramono (another fav song of mine) perfectly herself while performing on a grand piano. Ah, I think that was the point when I vowed to support her musical works forever XD. Okay enough rambling..seriously. Your comments contents are turning into some mini blog themselves lol. I guess this is what you get when you blog about Nana-chan. Lol
P.S: I like Mirai Kono Hoshi De too.
Holy shiz @ Julius’ comment! That is like, a 1000000x times better than that incoherent rubbish I wrote up top! I must say I am really happy that other Nana fans are just as (or more) passionate than I am about her – makes me feel all warm & fuzzy, ah… and I may be bothered by her slightly crooked teeth, but I do love her smile too!
One of the best things about following Nana is that I can put my money where my mouth is – it is one thing raving about appreciating and liking a seiyuu but it makes me feel good that I can support her by buying all the CDs & DVDs she puts out. Even if it does make me a lot poorer – Nana is worth it.
EDIT: yay, #1 on Google for “mizuki nana rules” too. Nothing beats being #1 for ‘nana mizuki sexual encounter’ though, lol.
@ Julius: What exactly are “few” photobooks? I only got Iris and Sing Forever (I refuse to call that piece of treasure a score book). I’d love to know the others. And agreed about how she’s not (really) selling her looks –heck, not a single shot with provocative clothes in 8 years of idol career. Not that I want one, seeing her in winter clothes already makes my nose bleeds.
And her lives are my fav too. She has improved a lot, but re-watching her older stuffs is never boring, she’s already awesome since Live Attraction 2002. I heard some haters said she’s not friendly in RL (to the point of writing it in her wiki, and I also read 2ch losers hate her), but I doubt it –having seen all her “making of” and following her blog, she must be one of the humblest idol on earth, to the point of looking like she doesn’t really understand what she’s worth.
..back to study >_>
@j1m0ne:
Nah, all I did was to type out how I first got to know about Nana-chan. You provided a lot more hard data and trivial than I did not even know existed. Take Power Gate for example, I was under the impression that the album was a top-seller, now I know how Nana started small and only sold only 3,430 copies. That makes me appreciate her current success even more. : )
@danie~:
Yup, Iris and Sing Forever are the “few” photobooks I was talking about. She never released any more than that, I think. Which is a shame, really.
The recent season of anime has shown off a quality of Nana’s that is so completely attractive for me: her energy and good cheer. As Allison in Allison to Lilia and Kotoko in Itazura na Kiss, the very energy in her voice carries the plot forward and seems to stimulate the other characters around her to move with her. For me, Nana is actually the only reason I am still watching Itazura na Kiss. As a public figure, her cheer seems to shine from her eyes. All of the pictures where she is looking as cute as a button is when her hair is made up to properly frame her face starting from the top down with her eyes all the way to her smile. The natural rise of the outer corners of her eyes also seems to contribute to her sparkle.
I would still love to hear more of her Touma perhaps because that voice still carries her energy that I so adore but brings a sour sort of overtone with it. Either way, it seems that Nana has already carved out a niche for herself in the seiyuu/singer world that will be hard to match because she seems to so completely own her image. I hope that Nana will continue to perform as I will be happy with probably anything she puts out. I’m glad to read how well she is received by English-speaking fans.
PS. It’s post like these that make me feel great to be a fan of Nana; of anime; and especially of you, j1m0ne, for bringing so much seiyuu rabu to the blogsphere. Truly deserving of the ABA award you received.
nice write up j1m0ne! i got to know much more about nana through your blog, in fact i come to put her as one of my top performers because of your informative posts. i love how nana performs live, the energy she just shows is just unequal to many other performers. i’m surely putting being first hand at one of her lives top on my priority list. also not forgetting the cheeky smile nana always puts on/you can see in almost all her photographs – she’s really enjoying what she’s doing, and we’re enjoying what she’s singing. really, every time i see nana, it’s that smile of hers that brings the fun and the energy into her performances – and that makes us love her more.
[...] Nana stuffs afraid I’d screw it up and chose to fix her wiki instead. However, after reading j1m0ne’s post, somehow I got an urge to really do it. I mean, being a compsci student and a so-called fan(atic), [...]
Personally, I never liked Nana Mizuki’s music much. Her voice is powerful and her live performances are spot on, but I just don’t like the style (in so many of her songs she does this thing with her voice, sort of a yodeling thing which I just don’t really like). But that’s just me, and I still listen to some of her songs xD Unlike most people, I like her voice acting better. I’ve only listened to her in a few things, like DTB, Naruto and Shining Tears. But I was just HOMFG THEY’RE ALL THE SAME VOICE.
>Emily
Yodeling >_> it’s called a vibrato, which is essential for enka singers. I take it you don’t like enka >o<
And the thing about having the same voice in everything? Ppl like Koyasu Takehito, Wakamoto Norio & Nakahara Mai sound the same every single time, but it’s their level of expression & effectiveness at bringing the character to life, making them sound believable etc that sets them apart from the rest. It’s not a must for seiyuu to differentiate their voices for every show if its not a requirement.
Check out ‘Kei no Uta’. It was the ending song for Inukami! ep 12 and 13. I think it is quite nice (:
Okay, I really laughed hard on that Jero comment there. Oh, man, that takes me back a bit.
Anyways, Nana definitely has the charm, and that’s what makes her so awesome. That, and she has a great voice (duh). Well, I don’t really care for her seiyuu roles (even though that would make me wanna watch the anime she’s in) but it’s really the singing that I find outstanding.
Liked both her voice work and her singing. Whatever else I want to say has already been elaborated more eloquently by you guys here.
Coincidently, I first came across her name, not through one of her more renowned roles (this seems to be a norm for me, knowing about VAs through unorthodox means) but instead Yufa from the Ragnarok anime, Yui Minamito from Ichigo 100% (got familiar with VAs like Sanae Kobayashi from that show though i didn’t like it or the manga) and Colette from Tales of Symphonia.
reply to j1m0ne >
lol I dictionaried “yodeling” and it said fast changes in pitch or something. Close enough xD It’s ok but I don’t particularly like it and I find it annoying when overused.
I know it’s not a must that seiyuu to differentiate their voices- they’re acting, and well, you don’t see Cate Blanchett or something trying to change/hide their voice. But if they can differentiate their voice, to the point “wow, there’s no was I could have guessed that they were voiced by the same person” then I really find that something impressive. And if a seiyuu can give a really expressive performance and still differentiate their voice, then to me they’re more talented than a seiyuu who can only do one.
I ended up reading this post today and I must say that even if it wasn’t an essay or something among those lines, it’s clear it was written out of admiration and I can relate with that when we’re discussing Mizuki Nana. Anyway, don’t have anything else to add, I hope she continues to release good music since it’s almost impossible for me to travel to Japan and attend a live concert.
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