Prior to interviewing Koichi Yamadera, a top voice actor, mimic and TV celebrity, I thought it would be tacky to ask him for samples of his many voices, from the characters on the popular "Anpanman" kiddy cartoon show to the hero of Hitoshi Takekiyo's new animated horror-comedy "Hokago Middonaitazu (After School Midnighters)" — a plastic human-anatomy model in a tony private elementary school who only comes to life, together with his skeleton sidekick, after midnight.
But the effervescent Yamadera, who was promoting the film at Shinjuku's Wald 9 theater, needed no prompting to let loose with his versions of Huey Lewis and Tina Turner, whom he impersonated in a recent "We Are the World" parody video, and even a quack of Donald Duck, whose voice he dubs in local versions of classic Disney cartoons. ("It's harder to get the quack right than to do the actual acting," he admitted.)
Born in Miyagi Prefecture in 1961, Yamadera was the sort of kid who imitated TV cartoon characters to impress his friends. He did not, however, always consider voice acting his calling: As a student at Tohoku Gakuin University he joined a rakugo (comic storytelling) club and toyed with becoming an actor or, using his gift of the gab, a salesman. But in 1984 he entered a training school for voice actors and in '85 was cast in his first voice-acting role in the anime "Megazone 23."