The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Uzumaki

Kirei lives in a town that lately has odd occurrences, and each one somehow is connected to a spiral. Soon, the spiral occurrences spread to infect even the bodies of people, which suddenly turns the everyday events in her life into chaos and horror.

Uzumaki is based on the Uzumaki manga series by Junji Ito. The anime series airs on Adult Swim's Toonami programming block on Saturday nights at 12:30 a.m. EDT and streams on Max.

Like any other self-respecting weeb who also harbors a deep, lifelong love for horror, I respect the genius of Junji Ito. Sure, I've come to also appreciate some of his flaws as a storyteller as I've become more familiar with his work over the years, but when the man cooks, the results are nothing short of legendary. Uzumaki is one of those legendary creations that absolutely deserves its place amongst the pantheon of Great Horror Manga, even if it isn't Ito's most perfect work (or even necessarily my personal favorite).

All of this is to say that I have been awaiting Adult Swim and director Hiroshi Nagahama's long-gestating adaptation of Uzumaki ever since it was first announced back in 2019. It's no secret that the other attempts at translating Ito's works to other mediums, be they live-action or animation, have been, well, pretty crappy. Still, every single scrap of animation that we saw teased from Nagahama's crew at studio Fugaku made it seem like Uzumaki would, ironically, be the one to dodge the dreaded Ito curse. I want to say this upfront: from an aesthetic standpoint, Uzumaki is essentially flawless. Everything about its incredible rotoscoped animation, its pristine black-and-white cinematography, and Colin Stetson's haunting soundtrack makes Ito's original artwork come to life in a manner that I frankly did not think was possible. It is, hands down, one of the most gorgeous productions I have seen in my life. I could drink this show in for hours on the strength of its visuals and soundscape alone.

However. As much as it pains me to say it, the rumblings I've heard about this adaptation's choppy pacing and fractured structure were not unfounded. From the get-go, I knew that trying to cram all 600-plus pages of the Uzumaki manga into a mere four twenty-three-minute episodes was never going to happen if the show didn't make some big alterations and cuts to the source material. While I applaud this first episode for taking some necessary liberties in rearranging the order of events and creating some parallel timelines for stories that originally stood on their own, I'm afraid this version of Uzumaki remains heavily compromised. This first episode on its own covers no fewer than four different stories from the manga to some degree or another, and the way they've all been shoved haphazardly into the premiere's short runtime means that the once haunting and foreboding opening chapters of the Uzumaki saga have become frantic and manic, almost to the point of being incoherent.

Horror generally demands two key ingredients to truly get under its audience's skin: Time, and silence. Uzumaki deals in neither of these necessities, and the end result is a stunningly gorgeous horror TV show that is too loud and hurried to be scary. There are still moments, here and there, that manage to capture the fascinatingly horrifying power of Ito's imagery: I physically winced watching Shuichi's mother slice off her own fingertips to be rid of the spirals buried in her flesh, and my jaw nearly hit the floor at how amazingly the episode executed the reveal of Azami's “scar.” If we had a few more episodes to work with, or if the production had been able to wrangle together some double-length mini-movies to have more room to establish the story's necessary atmosphere, the Uzumaki anime might have ended up as a true landmark of the horror genre, just like its source material. As it stands, I fear that the best we can hope for is an incredibly well-produced visual companion to a tale that still works best on paper.

I am beginning to think it may be impossible to successfully adapt Junji Ito's manga to anime. It's a particular shame with Uzumaki because it comes so close to working. The animation is intensely unsettling in ways that feel intentional. The music has an unnerving Philip Glass quality that made my skin crawl, and the decision to animate it in black and white was an excellent one. It gives it a timeless feel, like the horrors that unfold could happen at any time, in any place. I also very much like how the backgrounds are largely static, giant posters with hidden spirals, like the world's worst seek-and-find puzzle.

Regretfully, all of this is trampled on by the overwhelming problem of pacing. For some unknown reason, the decision was made to rampage through a story best experienced at a crawl. Junji Ito is, among other things, a master of creeping horror, the sort of story where everything is perfectly normal, maybe even too normal until the terrors are allowed to peek through. However, the anime adaptation of Uzumaki seems to have missed that particular message. Heroine Kirie and her boyfriend Shuichi are nearly side characters in their own story, with Kirie robbed of a lot of her scenes and her position as the voice of reason in a world slowly going mad. Shuichi's father is over and done with in this first episode, while at least three other spiral-mad characters are hustled across the screen in quick time, depriving them of their shock value.

That's not to say that this doesn't still have its moments of effectiveness. Scenes of Shuichi's parents – his dad spiraled up in a giant round pot and his mom cutting off her fingerprints are still visceral, as is his father's descent into spiral-madness. But it goes by too quickly to be fully shocking. Someone seems to have missed the message that “terror” and “horror” are two separate halves of an Ito story (something he himself talks about in his forthcoming [as of this writing] book Uncanny), or possibly that they're two separate things at all. The result is an episode of could-have-been: Uzumaki could have been an excellent tale of creeping terror. Instead, it's a pale imitation of its source material.

Horror as a genre is not for me. It's not because I am too afraid to watch it in the moment but rather the nightmares that linger for weeks after; I get little enough restful sleep as it is. So for me to enjoy a horror story, it has to be so compelling that I find it worth the punishment. And this first episode of Uzumaki is worth the price.

Of course, I'm not exactly new to Uzumaki. I've read the manga and even enjoyed the camp nature of the live-action film (if for the hair battle alone). And I have to say, this anime feels like the manga in motion. The black and white color scheme and the attention to detail in the movements of the characters and spirals—it's stylistically perfect. The images on the screen are even more disturbing than they were on the page.

All this is highlighted by the music (and often lack there of). It only makes everything more tense—like a bomb is set to go off any minute. Likewise, the voice actors sound more like real people than characters—giving the word a sense of reality despite its surreal nature and animated format.

My only complaint is the pacing. Much of what makes the manga so captivating is its unsettling nature—how everything just feels wrong and progressively gets more so before reaching a crazy climax. Because this series only has four episodes to tell it tale, things seem to go a bit faster than they should, putting more focus on the graphic climax than the tense build up.

Still, even with this sole misstep, I am more than happy with the final product and can't wait to see the remaining four episodes—despite the nightmares they will surely bring.