Dustin Roberts
Fans have been waiting for upwards of five years for the Adult Swim Anime adaptation of Uzumaki, Junji Ito’s horror Manga masterpiece. After some delays, fans were skeptical that it would ever find a release, and when it was announced that it would only be 4 short episodes (the manga is about 650 pages), fans stayed skeptical that Adult Swim would do it justice. Now that the first episode is here, I can say with full confidence that this adaptation is in good hands. Episode 1 conveys the disturbing, twisted world of Uzumaki with a pitch-perfect understanding of the original Manga’s tone—both the intense, gruesome horror and Ito’s signature silly sense of humor—though its pacing may turn off some viewers.
In Uzumaki, we are introduced to Kirie Goshima and Shuichi Saito, two former classmates who clearly have a deep friendship. They live in the small town of Kurouzu-cho, though Shuichi now goes to school in a different town. Shuichi quickly expresses his concern over the increasing whirlpools in a local river, and random spiral patterns happening all over the city. Kirie is bemused by this observation, though she quickly notices strange goings on relating to spirals. Shuichi’s father has become obsessed with “the art of the spiral,” and cannot seem to go a moment without contemplating any and all spirals around him—to the point of desiring only to turn himself into a spiral, first by rolling his eyes into a spiral pattern, then by showing off the preternatural ability to roll his tongue into a large spiral and escalating from there to horrific results.
As the pair navigate this strange occurrence other phenomena begin to occur that are unrelated to Shuichi’s father’s obsession. The structure of the anime has the two protagonists bouncing between several stories—involving a girl with a partial but growing spiral scar on her forehead that makes her irresistible to the boys around her, a slow and sweaty classmate forming a spiral shell on his back, Shuichi’s mother who becomes obsessively and dangerously averse to spirals, among others, and while it may feel a little overstuffed, it manages to bounce between these things elegantly.
Episode 1 is a masterpiece in economic visual storytelling. Within minutes, it was clear why it took the studio so long to complete it. Each frame is a beautifully rendered version of Ito’s manga, and it’s some of the most gorgeous animation that I’ve seen in any genre in many years. With the manga, Ito’s artwork invites closer inspection. Each frame is full of wonderful detail and emotion, and the anime is just as marvelous to look at. There were many times in its 22-minute runtime that I wanted to pause the action so that I could linger a little longer on an image. I don’t know if any other anime has ever captured the style of manga as beautifully as this does. It honestly feels like the action from the manga the way it plays out in my head. The animations are smooth and the images are striking and iconic.
While some were worried about the brevity of the series, those worries can be put to rest. The manga is very episodic, with each story being fairly straightforward, and with much of the storytelling happening within single images. Sometimes Ito takes several frames to convey a second’s worth of action, so it makes sense that the people working on the Anime can fit in a lot of the plot pretty quickly. This single episode covers chapters 1, 2, 3, and parts of 6, and 8 among others.
While it may have been nice to have an episode for each story, that would require dragging some fairly brief and straightforward plots out to fill the run time. By combining several stories at once and cutting between them, we get a greater sense of urgency and intensity. Things fall apart quickly in Uzumaki, and the viewer gets an incredibly strong sense of that from this episode. The feeling of intense dread begins mounting from the first moment and doesn’t let up, but only intensifies.
We don’t get a great sense of the protagonists as a result of the pace of the story, which is a shame, but it’s a worthwhile sacrifice. The characters in the manga are fairly thin, so we aren’t losing much. They exist to witness the surreal horrors of the spiral as it unleashes more and more insanity onto Kurouzu-cho. There are a few short, quiet character moments, so over the course of the whole 4 episode run, I’m sure that we’ll get a greater sense of who they are as people.
If the upcoming episodes of Uzumaki are as thoughtfully constructed as episode one was, fans of Ito and cosmic horror are in for a wonderful, if brief, treat. It’s tough for me to say whether or not this will land for the uninitiated (it does feel a little bit like a greatest hits from the manga), but for fans of Ito’s work, this adaptation retains the grotesque and beautiful cosmic horror of the manga.
