Astrid walks back into her room, looks at her missed calls and plays the third voicemail. Her teacher is on the line, irritated about her homework, and he’s voiced by Hideo Kojima.
The man behind Death Stranding has a voice cameo in Prelude to The End, an animated short My Chemical Romance released with no warning yesterday evening, just ahead of Halloween weekend.
A teacher who’s done waiting for homework
The credits list Kojima as The Teacher. His entire role is a single voicemail, and it’s cut off mid-sentence:
“Astrid your Japanese homework is late again. This is unacceptab-“
That’s the whole performance. It lands if you recognize the voice, and a lot of Kojima fans didn’t until they saw his name in the credits.
Prelude to The End is seven and a half minutes long. It’s a stop-motion dark fairytale adapted from director Lauren Tsai’s The Dying World, and it doubles as the 20th anniversary music video for “The End,” the first track on The Black Parade, the New Jersey band’s landmark rock album.
Other famous callers
Kojima has company in Astrid’s inbox. Phoebe Bridgers (who made Lost Weekend) and Billie Eilish (who made Hit Me Hard and Soft) leave messages too. Both are Grammy winners, and they split those few seconds of voicemail with Kojima. The band clearly packed the missed-calls scene with as many big names as it could fit.
A longtime fan
Anyone who follows Kojima online won’t be surprised. He’s posted about My Chemical Romance many times. Early in 2022 he showed off some of his favorite pieces of band merch, and he later said he’d seen them in concert that same year.
Here’s how he described the audience: “When I went to the venue, there were almost all teenage girls. I didn’t see any old men in my age. But as I was wearing the band T-shirt, people said to me ‘I like your T-shirt, Ojisan.’
A few days ago he left a clue, too. He wrote about buying the 20th Anniversary Edition of The Black Parade on vinyl, which looked like a normal fan post until the short dropped. After the release, he posted about his role on X/Twitter.
Cameos on the side
Kojima has been popping up in other people’s work for years. He broke the fourth wall to appear in the Metal Gear Solid series, which he created and led for a long stretch. He had a part in CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 and recently returned to that role in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2.
The appearances have picked up pace lately, and they’ll likely keep coming while OD and Physint remain his main projects. Last night also brought the first trailer for Death Stranding Isolations, the anime spinoff series. Another Kojima cameo, this one live-action, is confirmed, though what it’s for hasn’t been announced.