Yuuma Uchida is the voice actor for Ritsuka Uenoyama in the Given anime.
Perspectives on Given[]
Feels Given is a work that carefully expresses the swaying hearts of the two people. Adding more, that Yuuma is looking for the whereabouts of passions, and feels that each characters struggle will be their youth. In character he wanted to go out and exchange words with Mafuyu carefully.[1]
Yuuma read the original manga and thought it was a work that carefully depicts the movements of high school boys. Each one of them was awkward and he felt his youth in feelings, thoughts that he could not do anything about. That with the sparkle of feelings he felt for the first time was what made the beauty of the work.
As a performer, Yuuma considers BL works to be more closely related to each other and the sense of distance is much more important than other works. He was looking forward to playing his part in Given, with Ritsuka a character that carefully depicts human communication.
Adding that with many male characters in Given, the approach to making roles different, Yuuma felt like he was picking up the air and everyday life in the band. The story is that words and music are born out of their minds, and the scenes that show this are very important.
Detailing that when Ritsuka and Mafuyu are talking at school, to walking around the city, they have conversations without love but the distance between the two people shrink at such moments. With that and their moments in the band, Yuuma felt such conversations were more important than in other anime because it led to great emotions out of nothing but conversation.
Movement of the heart in the series was considered very important, whilst other works concern a clear dream and a process towards a goal such as reaching a certain point, Given is normal in that Yuuma was drawing high school students daily lives, and he thought they were showing a sense of reality, not a dream for viewers.
When asked how he perceives the genre of BL as a performer, regarding recording Yuuma said he would do something that he would not usually do, first asking himself what should he do. It was easy participating in the BL work for the first time. Continuing that is was fun to be an actor because with this genre he can meet emotions that he has never felt by himself and was very happy to have that opportunity.[2]