At long last, Adult Swim and Ghost in the Shell animation studio Production I.G‘s anime adaptation of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki is finally here. While Uzumaki isn’t the first anime adaptation of Ito’s works, it’s saddled with the unenviable task of having the most to prove, given that both Netflix and Crunchyroll tried their hand and failed at living up to the source material in their respective anthology series, Junji Ito Collection and Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre.
In their wake was the consensus in the anime community that Ito’s specific brand of horror couldn’t be adapted into anime. Uzumaki‘s Sisyphean task to prove naysayers wrong hit another snag; the anime—originally due in 2019—spiraled into three production delays, making the show feel just as cursed as its story.
Despite the show’s significant setbacks and self-administered delay to recreate “the quality of the intricate designs and detailed line work of” Ito’s magnum opus, Uzumaki‘s premiere episode is nothing short of a triumph in animation that was well worth the wait.
Based on Ito’s 1998 manga series, Uzumaki follows the story of a high school girl named Kirie Goshima, who lives in the mysterious sequestered seaside town of Kurouzu-cho. One day, a mysterious spiral pattern appears in innocuous places throughout the townfolk’s everyday lives. It becomes an all-encompassing obsession, cursing chosen denizens in increasingly gruesome, body horror-inducing ways.
The aforementioned Ito anime adaptations failed to meet expectations in the past, thanks partly to their dogmatic fixation on being a one-to-one recreation of Ito’s manga panels. Because anime’s key selling point is animation, filling in the gaps between those iconic panels felt less like breathing life into the work and more like a flat replication akin to a slideshow. What’s more, their desaturated colors not only siphoned whatever life was left out of their visual presentation, but also nullified its terror by adding too much visual noise that ultimately distracted them from their execution.
Adult Swim’s handling of Uzumaki is downright inspired by its novel idea of making the show entirely black and white, its mesmerizing use of motion capture, and its blend of 3D and 2D animation. In what can only be described as rotoscope meets director Akira Kurosawa’s signature noir visual flair, Uzumaki‘s animation casts a spell as intoxicating as the spiral itself, whether it be the surreal swirl of its ever-shifting macabre Midnight in Paris-esque skies, the fascinating sway and bounce of its characters’ hair and expressive mannerisms, or the disturbing extreme close-ups as its cast descends into madness. Its English and Japanese voice casts do an outstanding job of bringing their characters to life. Even the show’s accompanying soundtrack—a typically understated aspect in animation projects—submerges viewers into the mad world of Uzumaki. However, that should come as no surprise given its composer is Colin Stetson, the man behind A24’s 2018 horror film Hereditary.
Don’t just take my word for it; even Ito praised the anime adaptation in a 2020 interview with io9.
“I think Uzumaki is the most complete demonstration of my artistic ability and imagination,” Ito said. “The contrast of the black and white art really leaves a vivid impression, and I wonder if that’s what makes other creators curious about trying to adapt it.”
Like most anime adaptations, many aspects of the source material are left on the cutting room floor, and Uzumaki is no different. Going off the premiere episode alone, Uzumaki has the arduous task of condensing its 19-chapter manga with 32 pages into four episodes with a 23-minute anime runtime. For those keeping score, the premiere episode ends around the manga’s third chapter, with some spillover into its fourth. Ultimately, the math on its episode-to-chapter count is pretty clean as far as adaptations go. However, this comes with the caveat that Uzumaki‘s first episode moves briskly. Fortunately, Uzumaki‘s pacing doesn’t hamper the execution of its central story beats, or the intrigue and unease of its horrifying imagery. Rather than use Ito’s page-turning frights as jump-scare fodder, each sinister scene in Uzumaki lingers long enough to give Ito’s visuals all the weight and gravitas necessary to make its macabre animation hit home.
Overall, Uzumaki‘s first episode casts an enchanting spell of its own through the detailed technical innovations of Production I.G’s animation that will hopefully keep up its winning momentum to end the Junji Ito anime adaptation curse once and for all.
The first episode of Uzumaki premieres on Adult Swim on September 28, with next-day streaming on Max.
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