Uzumaki

Episode 1

If you've read our Most Anticipated Anime of Fall 2024 article or yesterday's ANN After Show, you know that expectations are high for Hiroshi Nagahama and Adult Swim's Uzumaki anime adaptation. The four-episode series was pushed back multiple times due to the effects of COVID-19, only serving to strengthen the anticipation of what, by all accounts, appeared to be an adaptation that does Junji Ito's art justice. Fans of the prolific horror manga creator have been burned in the past, but trailers for Nagahama and Production I.G's adaptation backed by tracks by Hereditary's Colin Stetson were immensely promising.

The series' opener won't premiere for a few more days, but having seen the first episode, I can assure horror and anime fans alike that this episode looks and sounds amazing. Its only fault is, unfortunately, a significant one; you can't speed-run the feeling of dread.

Uzumaki's first episode covers manga chapters 1-3, which are primarily concerned with Shuichi's parents and Azami Kurotani. In short summary, Uzumaki opens on Kirie Goshima as she stands on a small hill overlooking the sea in her hometown of Kurouzu-cho. Kirie is our point-of-view character, and the opening scene is presented as if she's looking back on a series of strange events she encountered in the town. We then go to the start of these strange events when Kirie's long-time boyfriend Shuichi explains that his father has recently become obsessively fixated on the spiral shape.

Many of the manga's iconic images are derived from these first three chapters, and they comprise most of what is shown in the trailers: Shuichi's dad's curled-up tongue, his impossible spinning eyes, and his ultimate fate of becoming a human cinnamon roll inside the tub-like basin he orders. Individually, these are incredibly unsettling moments, but the first episode of Uzumaki has no creeping build-up. There is no space for the audience to settle in and notice the strange spiral obsession encroaching on the town's citizens. Everything involving Shuichi's father is presented and closed out in the episode's first 10 minutes. The latter half is focused on Azami, and the audience is asked to believe she meets and becomes obsessed with Shuichi in the remaining 12 minutes of screen time. If this pace continues in the remaining three episodes, Uzumaki runs the risk of becoming a pastiche of manga references for fans to notice.

The narrative issues in this episode can be chalked up to what had to be cut from the runtime. It's understandable that with its limited resources, cuts must be made. The Uzumaki manga is well over 600 pages long and includes more than a dozen weird spiraling events; it was never going to be a 1:1 animated recreation with its roughly 100-minute runtime. The staff was going to have to make choices, but in its hurry to check off some of the manga's best-known images, they lacked the shock value of the original. If we look at the original Azami story specifically, her obsession with Shuichi escalates after his rejection to inventing reasons to see him to purchasing an apartment in town to stalk him to her final confrontation. That build-up, which could have been translated on screen by interweaving her story to a conclusion in later episodes, is excised.

Oddly, Kirie also seems to suffer the most from the script rewrites. Junji Ito isn't exactly known for writing especially compelling protagonists, as they're often every-person types who have weird things happen to them (if they aren't out-and-out villains). Still, Kirie did have some flare of personality, initially offering Shuichi much more plausible explanations for the town's occurrences. Here, that dialogue is absent, and she becomes a blank slate, another character confronted by horrifying things but lacking any sort of distinct personality.

Despite all of my criticism of the narrative's pacing, I can't argue that Uzumaki does have the vibes. Nagahama's (expensive) decision to use motion capture for the series entirety, build it in CG, and then have the animation staff redraw the footage created something incomparable in the anime landscape. Uzumaki is breathtaking in its fluidity and uncanny recreation of Junji Ito's artwork. The only aspect approaching it in sheer quality is Stetson's soundtrack, which manages to invoke the eerie spinning of something you'd rather not confront.

While I didn't get the emotional experience I hoped for from the premiere of Uzumaki, its visual presentation and soundtrack far exceeded my expectations. I have trepidation about how it will all play out because, again, this is a large amount of material, and eventually, there is lore that the anime could concern itself with, or it could stick to its series of strange events approach. Time will tell.

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Uzumaki is currently airing on Adult Swim and is streaming on Max.