Junji Ito’s Uzumaki had its anime premiere on the 28th in Japan, with a next-day premiere in the States on HBO Max. An anime entirely in black and white, with an art style that really honors the original manga. The show itself premiered with a Japanese sub and an English dub, which I found to be a nice surprise, since I’m used to waiting three months just for an English dub to release one episode every weekend. Uzumaki is a four-episode show, and will presumably release every Sunday into the middle of October. There was a movie released in 2000, but on the account of I’ve never heard of it and it looks like found footage, I’ll disregard it.
Uzumaki is the story of two friends, Shuichi and Kirie, located in a small town. All that is right and good goes left when spirals start to invade and contort the world that they know. Literally. The beginning of the end comes in the form of a beautiful woman, Azami Kurotani, with an oddly-shaped scar on her forehead. Men want her, fish (and also men) fear her.
Every character in this show is competing for Forbes #1 crash-out. Every time I thought, okay, this can’t get weirder, Junji Ito heard my prayers and somebody got swallowed whole. There’s one normal dude in the entire town and he’s a delivery man we see for about three seconds. The entire show being in black and white with this strange, defined art-style really lent itself well to the horror aspect. I don’t think the show being in color would have made it any less disturbing, but it would have been less impactful.
This show is full of weird visuals and gore. If you can’t handle classics like Saw and Poltergeist, I’d stay far away from Uzumaki. It’s a good introduction to horror anime if you’re not sensitive to blood, mutilation, contortion, and loose eyeballs. Emphasis on the contortion, guys. How that man fit into that bathtub like that, I’ll never know.
Despite all of this, I did enjoy it in a weird, half-look at it while I play Homescapes kind of way. The plot moved fast and I feel like I’ve seen every clip shown in the trailer, which is probably my only complaint. I’ve never read the manga, so I can’t speak to how fast the pacing is, but I would have enjoyed more development into Kirie and Shuichi to really understand the universe and how the spiral is going to affect them. Honestly, the entire first episode felt like a second, more in-depth trailer. . I blink, and we’re in a whole new section of town with five new characters I’ve never seen before in my life.
Just like we did with Loki, Uzumaki will be an ongoing article as the show releases and I slowly descend into spiral madness. Tune in next week for my out-of-depth review of Uzumaki: Episode Two.
EPISODE TWO: How Did it Get Worse?
While we’ve been away (blame midterms), Uzumaki has undergone some changes. Just watching the episode, the average joe can tell that something is very different about this episode; not in content but in the animation quality itself. I painstakingly made it to the credits to discover that episode one and two have entirely different production teams and directors.
It shows. Episode two lacked a lot of the careful details that episode one had. It felt incredibly horror-forward, pushing the grotesque elements of Uzumaki rather than the literally anything else. One guy’s a snail, then everybody is a snail, and they all look nasty. The animation itself was different too, with a slightly different style and subpar lipsyncing, even in the Japanese audio. It physically pained me to watch this episode, and not in the way I expect from a horror anime.
There is some development on the spiral front with a small, basically throw-away line about people being buried instead of cremated because of the spiraling smoke in the sky. Kirie takes spiraling with a…literal meaning, horrifying the entire town with her evil hair.
I had high hopes for the Uzumaki anime to live up to “Junji Ito’s Greatest Work,” but this show looks like a flop. Despite it being pushed back two years with delays, I think they should’ve taken at LEAST another six months to settle on an animation studio instead of getting us hooked and then screwing us over.
Tune back in next week for a review of Uzumaki: Episode Three.
