It’s February 25th in Japan when this post is published, which means it’s the birthday of one Hanazawa Kana!
HanaKana is considered to be an extremely popular voice actress within the anime industry, given her many main roles (around 150-200 of them!) in various anime, some of them even being in well-known franchises like Durarara!, the Monogatari series, and Steins;Gate.
Really, her talent with voice acting is displayed with every role she is given. And even though she usually does roles that are more soft-sounding and sweet like Mayuri in Steins;Gate or Onodera in Nisekoi, we’ve seen that HanaKana has the ability to drastically change up how she acts if she has to.
I, like many other anime fans, have heard HanaKana in many of the shows I’ve seen, whether that be her acting as a goofy teenager or someone who’s more mature. Just to name a couple roles, I gotta say my favorites of hers has to be AE3803/Red Blood Cell from Cells at Work, as she did a great job acting like a clumsy and happy-go-lucky person in that enjoyable anime…
…as well as her role of Yukino Yukari from Shinkai Makoto’s The Garden of Words (as well her in Your Name). Her having a way more soft and young adult-like voice as Yukari was just really pleasant and relaxing to hear, compared to the goofy/high-pitched roles she usually has.
While HanaKana is more experienced and skilled at voice acting, her branching out to live-action roles has been shown to be great as well. Personally I believe she did a nice job in her very first live action role in the drama short film Kimi ga Inakucha Dame Nanda, which her character was still pretty similar to what she usually portrays in anime. Oh, and I guess you can include these silly little commercials she starred in:
And since one of the main topics I talk about on this blog is music, it’s a given that we should take a listen to her musical abilities. She has done many openings, endings and character songs for the anime she has starred in, with the fourth opening of Bakemonogatari, “Renai Circulation”, being the more well-known song heard from her (and has more or less become a meme on the Internet in recent years).
I actually have been listening to HanaKana’s most recent album that came out a few days ago (most likely it was released around this time in celebration of her birthday), Coco Base, and WOW. There are some incredible songs from that album, some that made me stop what I was doing and made me just sit there and listen to the greatness in the music and Hanazawa Kana’s voice. Please take a listen to these two songs:
Overall, Hanazawa Kana is such a lovable person, both in her anime roles and as a seiyuu personality. She’s definitely deserving of all the work and popularity she has gotten over the past year and I just hope she continues to be successful for a very long time!
MyAnimeList Page: https://myanimelist.net/people/185/Kana_Hanazawa
Before I end off this post, here’s a fun video of other seiyuu great Sugita Tomokazu getting quizzed about HanaKana, and we actually see that he knows everything about her 😛
Thanks for reading!! 😀
-al
omunibasu 