Anime Lovers

At this year’s Anime NYC we, alongside other members of the press, had the opportunity to speak with members of the cast of Love Live! Superstar!! about their experiences with the incredible multimedia franchise and voice acting in general. Taking part in that conversation were Sayuri Date, voice of Kanon Shibuya, Naomi Payton, voice of Sumire Heanna, and Akane Yabushima, voice of Mei Yoneme. We asked about their experiences as voice actresses, whether they had originally envisioned the career, their collaborative work, and Love Live! Superstar!! Season 3.

Sections of this interview have been lightly edited for clarity.

Becoming Voice Actresses and Joining the Love Live! Series

Before joining the Love Live! series franchise and before becoming voice actresses in general, each of the three guests had different perspectives on pursuing the career. They each explained whether they had wanted to be a voice actress since childhood and what kinds of inspirations and actions led them to becoming one.

Sayuri Date: I wouldn’t say that I really wanted to be a voice actress. I wanted to be a member of the Love Live! series cast. When I was younger, I watched famous anime and not really idol anime until a friend recommended Love Live! to me. And it still feels like a dream, but I was able to make my childhood dream come true now. Now that I am Kanon, I’m super thankful. Every day I try to find a way to express my thanks in different ways. Every day, I think about what I can do and I’m still trying to figure that out.

Naomi Payton: Ever since I was little, I loved anime, not just Japanese anime but American cartoons too. I basically only watched anime and cartoons as a child. I was very familiar with voice actors. They felt really close to me; they were basically part of my life. I wanted to become a part of the anime world. I wanted to live in that world. I really loved daydreaming and imagining that I was someone else all the time, like a superhero saving the world. You could say that I had a very strong imagination. I loved entering that fantasy world and just becoming someone other than me. I figured that a realistic career path might actually be voice acting, so I pursued that. ( . . . )

Akane Yabushima: I wouldn’t say it was a dream, but basically one day I decided that I wanted to pursue voice acting. I’ve loved anime since I was little, but becoming a voice actress — at the time I didn’t really feel a connection between the two. But then I started acting, and I realized exactly how much fun that was. I could basically laugh, cry, be mad to the fullest, but that was only when I was acting. When I was acting, I could forget about everything else and just concentrate on that. I could encounter different versions of me I didn’t even know I could be. Voice actors have to do all of that but just with their voice, and eventually I found out how appealing that part of the job could be as well. And being able to evoke emotions for other people as well is very meaningful to me so I hope to continue to be able to do that.

All three of the actresses had encountered Love Live! in one way or another prior to their time as part of the franchise. In each of their cases, that contact came early on in life and continued as a persistent love for the series and its many forms.

Sayuri Date: I loved Love Live! ever since I was in elementary school. I actually made a lot of friends because of Love Live! because I loved it so much. Before that, I didn’t really get into anime that much. But after a friend recommended it to me, I very much got into the Love Live! series. It’s a very big part of my youth.

Naomi Payton: When I was in 6th grade, I watched the Kohaku Uta Gassen, which is an end-of-the-year New Year’s concert. It’s very big; everyone watches it. And I just happened to see μ’s -san on it. And after that, I just fell into the Love Live! series. This was right before I entered middle school, so while I was in middle school, I dreamed of joining the school idol club once I went into high school.

Akane Yabushima: I first encountered a video of μ’s -san on YouTube and that’s how I found Love Live!. I was watching the school idols and the voice actresses perform and I was shocked by how much they were in sync. It was basically watching the same thing. That’s how I got into it at first and I got more and more curious about Love Live!. And then I started watching the anime, and then I started playing the games, and then I fell more and more in love with the Love Live! series and my daily fun time was to play the game. The anime, the movie, and “Love Live!” itself became a very big part of my life. It is right now, obviously, and it will continue to be a very big part of my life.

When they found out they would be their respective members, all three voice actresses were incredibly happy, as one would expect. The voice actresses were asked about their reactions during that moment and whether they faced any challenges when taking on those roles.

Sayuri Date: It was my dream to become a part of the cast, so I was very, very extremely happy when it was first announced that I would be joining. But as time passed, reality set in, and I started wondering if I would be okay as Kanon. I don’t know if I would call it troubles, but I didn’t know how to approach her at first. After thinking about all that, I started not having as much fun with it because how I could be Kanon perfectly was just consuming my mind. And I also realized that this was something that I could only solve myself, so I was quietly fighting with myself for a while. But once I hit that wall, I also realized that before this, I had never really worked that hard to attain something, so this made me actually have to go through that. After meeting Kanon, she made me go through that. As a person, also, Kanon showed me some life lessons that I’m very grateful for, and since then, obviously, I’ve been able to perform and see everyone smile, and even though something felt really incomplete within me, it started gradually becoming more complete. And right now, I’m having a lot of fun, so I hope to keep doing my best as Kanon.

Naomi Payton: I encountered the role of Sumire in the audition and of course I wondered if I could actually be her. I was super happy that I got the role, and I wanted to do my absolute best as her. Personally, I am very earnest, serious, and hard working — probably a little too much at times — and I think I’m also a bit too hard on myself. At first at the rehearsal, I saw everyone else having fun singing and dancing while they were rehearsing. And I personally felt a little envious because I didn’t think I could be like that, and I had a tendency to compare myself to everyone else that was there. That was probably the longest conflict I had to deal with. But recently the three of us formed a subunit called CatChu! and I think that was when I finally realized that I was being a bit too hard on myself. I was able to let go of that, and I could finally be a little more free.

Akane Yabushima: When I first got the role, I was extremely happy. But also, just about the same amount, I was super nervous. The Love Live! series franchise has been going on for so long, and it’s an extremely loved series. So, it felt like I had a lot of responsibility now being a part of it. And playing Mei, I wanted to make sure that people would see just how wonderful she is. Something that made me nervous was the fact that Mei is a slightly newer type of school idol in the series. Her type’s not really in the past series. She tends to speak very harshly. She looks a little bit mean and is sort of hard to approach. So people, when they first meet her, always get the wrong idea that she might not be the nicest person. But she’s actually extremely nice, super caring, and loves cute things and school idols. I didn’t know how I was going to relay all that to everyone at first and I really had a hard time finding the answer. But as time went on, and the more time I spent with Mei, everyone started to tell me exactly how much they loved Mei and how cute she was and how much they liked her which made me very happy. All this positivity made me realize I was on the right track. I also got to see here (at Anime NYC) that there are so many people that love me. So, I’ll keep doing my best to make even more people love me.

Collaborations and Love Live! Superstar!! Season 3

One of the bigger collaborations that the three voice actresses took part in was a collaboration between the cast of Love Live! series and the cast of THE iDOLM@STER series. I asked them about their thoughts and feelings when they all first heard about the collaboration and how it felt to perform alongside not just their fellow Love Live! series cast members, but also the cast of THE iDOLM@STER series.

Sayuri Date: When I first heard about the fact that we were going to do this big collaboration event with iDOLM@STER series and Love Live! series I had a very hard time believing it was even going to happen, and Liella! was still pretty new, so I wasn’t sure if we were qualified to even be on that stage with everyone. So, we were all very nervous at first, and then we found out we were doing collaboration songs too. But we worked really hard as Liella!, no matter how nervous we were. And there’s a song called “Watashi no Symphony”, and that song itself is very important to the group from the very beginning. It talks a lot about dreams and making dreams come true. And Liella!, the group as a whole, has a lot of songs with the theme of everyone working together to make something happen. ( . . . ) Also, the choreography itself felt like we were grasping for our dreams. So, I was very, very happy to be there with all the members of my group. I’m sure that some people were seeing us live for the first time. And it made me really happy to see them, even if they’re seeing us for the first time, to at least try to shake the pen lights and sing along and dance along with us. It was very much a once-in-a-lifetime chance, so I hope we can do something that amazing again someday.

Naomi Payton: This was a huge collaboration with Love Live! series and iDOLM@STER series and I knew it was going to just feel like a dream. But one thing I remember very clearly even now is that school idols and idols, obviously they are alike. iDOLM@STER series has a song called M@STERPIECE, and some of the Love Live! series members got to sing it at the concert. And just the title of the song suggests, it is an actual masterpiece. A lot of the lyrics reflect how idols feel, as well as reflecting a lot of what school idols feel too. So, there was an overlap in that part. It was very memorable for me to be able to sing that song in front of everyone. ( . . . )

Akane Yabushima: I actually have loved iDOLM@STER series for a very, very long time, so I was extremely happy about the collaboration. And both Love Live! series and iDOLM@STER series have so many fans, and they both have a very long history. It was just too epic of a collaboration to even imagine how it was going to happen. And also, I was able to sing some iDOLM@STER series songs that I had admired for so long. Not only that, we actually got to sing the songs with them, so that was very special. It really, really felt like a dream. And they also sang some Liella! songs with us. I still can’t believe it was real. It really did feel like it was in another dimension. It was real, but still feels like it was a dream.

Ahead of the October premiere of Love Live! Superstar!! Season 3, we also asked about it. This third season is unique in that it’s the only Love Live! series to reach three seasons as well as a season that marks the appearance of two new members. I asked how it felt to have a third season of the anime with new members welcomed into the group.

Sayuri Date: I was extremely happy personally that the anime was coming back. The third gen members, there’s two new members, but they had actually joined the group a while back after the second season of the anime. The 11 of us had been performing that time live without those two being in the anime as much, and one not being in the anime at all yet. The rest of us, when we’re performing on stage we know how the members are going to act because we have the anime as something to reference. But the two third-gen students, had no example to work off of when they’re performing, so they often discussed exactly what they were going to do for the performances live, and they probably really had a lot more to think about than us, but now the anime is coming back. There’s 11 of us, and we’ve been working together for so long. We have a very deep bond, and I think the anime will be even more fun to watch because we’re that close now, and we’ll be able to watch the story and also reflect on the memories of the anime episodes. Because it’s high school, there’s also a lot of things to look forward to about youth. There’s a lot of youth involved, and because they’re school idols, obviously they’re sparkly, happy, but of course they’re going to have some conflict. There will be some struggles between each school year, so please look forward to seeing how they get over that.

Naomi Payton: This is the first Love Live! series to have a third season and again there’s going to be 11 of us now so we’re super excited about that. The two new members, I think everyone is excited to see what happens with them. And Margarete, she was actually in Season 2 as a rival to Liella! and there was a fierce rivalry — from Margarete at least. So, it will be interesting to see what happens to her now in Season 3. And then Tomari, who is the younger sister of Onitsuka Natsumi, who was in Season 2, is going to be in Season 3 and it will be nice to see exactly what happens with those two, so I hope that everyone will watch in real time as the episodes go on.

Akane Yabushima: Mei and Liella! will once again be moving in the anime, so I am very excited about that, in the earlier season, Mei always got to chase her other senpai. She got to look up to them. Now she’s going to have people under her doing the same thing to her. It’ll be interesting to see how they all grow from that. As she becomes a senpai herself, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of conflicts she faces and how she’ll be able to get over those. It’ll be very interesting to see exactly what kind of story the 11 members of Liella! will have in the third season. Please look forward to the new story and songs.

We’d like to thank Sayuri Date, Naomi Payton, and Akane Yabushima for taking the time to speak to us and give such thoughtful answers to many questions from members of the press. Love Live! Superstar!! Season 3 aired on October 6th, 2024, and is broadcast on Sundays in Japan. Crunchyroll streams all three seasons.

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