Dustin Roberts
This week’s episode keeps much of what made the series premiere so effective, though there is a noticeable drop in the quality of the animation. Still, the horrors of the spiral contamination in Kurouzu-cho are fascinating and disturbing to witness, even if this episode highlights some of Ito’s humor more than last week’s episode did.
Things become more directly dangerous for Kirie in this week’s episode of Uzumaki, as the spiral infects her hair. As her hair begins growing unnaturally quickly and forming strange curls that create multiple spirals growing out of her head, Kirie attempts to cut it off. She is unsuccessful, however, as the hair has a will of its own, and can fight her in her attempts—to the point of choking her. A classmate, Kyoko, becomes jealous of Kirie’s newfound attention, which is a byproduct of her brilliant hair spirals enchanting anyone who looks at them. This results in a strange and pretty funny hair fight between the two girls, with Kyoko fighting for the entranced attention of the onlookers, and Kirie only fighting to survive.
Meanwhile, Katayama’s sluggishness is compounded when he starts growing a huge snail shell on his back. He’s not terribly bothered by it when his classmates confront him, but pretty soon he turns into a very large snail in what is probably the most upsetting scene in the episode. Again, Ito’s humor comes through, as the new snail-Katayama crawls up the side of the school building, much to the horror of the rest of his classmates. Other people start to become snails as time goes on, and they mate and leave eggs in the forest near Kurouzu-cho.
Not everything is so strangely funny, there is a Romeo and Juliet-style romance between two teenagers whose families hate one another and forbid them from dating that is quite affecting. The lovers devise a plan to run away together, leaving the town by train, and thereby escaping their families (and, obviously, the spiral contamination, though they don’t seem very aware of that). At first, their story doesn’t seem to connect to the ever-growing spiral, though when their story does intersect with the spiral, the results are surreally heartwarming, and grotesque. It feels like a folktale with its romance, danger, and tragically poetic ending.
One of Uzumaki’s central motifs is on display in episode 2: the older generation failing to properly take care of the new generation, with children often left to fend for themselves at best, and actively being harassed by their parents at best. One wonders where the town leaders and parents are, only to realize that they either aren’t around, aren’t paying attention, or are doing damage of their own. In Uzumaki, there are no leaders, there is only the nightmare world and its effects. We can’t turn to anybody else for help, and we might not even be able to trust ourselves.
Even when episode 2 takes a turn back into straight horror, some sort of weirdly silly or funny moment undercuts some of the terror, including one scene of a tragic death that made me laugh out loud (stay for the after-credits scene for a jumpscare that serves as a gross-but-hilarious punchline to a joke set up by the aforementioned death). I can imagine some people unaccustomed to this sort of humor being turned off by some of this, but Ito’s humor is, I think, often overlooked by fans, and it’s nice to see it on full display here, even if the brisk pace means that the horror elements end up feeling somewhat muted as a result. In the manga, the humor is just enough to highlight the bizarre terror, just enough to make us uncomfortable with our laughter before we return to the horrors of the story, but here it seems to have taken center stage for better or worse.
The production is still wonderfully surreal and truly evocative of Ito’s manga, though the animation isn’t on par with episode 1’s, which is disappointing. Still, episode 2 is a bleak nightmare that I can’t wait to get back to next week.
