Animisery – A Blog About Living Miserably with Anime (Among Other Things)

Uzumaki just seemed, quite frankly, unadaptable. Other attempts to convert Junji Ito’s skin crawling pieces of manga horror into successful anime adaptations blew up in spectacular fashion. For example, Gyo’s anime adaptation is like watching the obligatory anime cutscene from a PS2 era game with its crappy shark usage. The only thing scary about the Junji Ito Collection is that Crunchyroll has someone on its PR staff who thinks that piece of hot garbage is worth anything gauging by the posts I used to see. I’ve not even seen the new stuff from Netflix because I know in my heart of hearts that it’s going to be a hot steamy damp pile of a shit show that will only serve to make me wonder how much is enough money for Junji Ito when he knows these adaptations are going to be utter trash devoid of any (or lack thereof) soul from his original works.

Uzuamaki seemed like it was going to be different.

The anime adaptation of Ito’s most popular (and in my opinion, best) work was going to be brought to us courtesy of Production I.G., notable anime studio behind Haikyuu, and Williams Street, Adult Swim’s in-house production studio! It was going to be in all black and white to service the manga and its atmosphere! The storyboards they dropped in 2022 looked phenomenal! An Ito work was finally set to be held at the same standard of his beloved manga and when the first episode dropped, I think every Ito fan breathed a sigh of relief.

Ito, however, is a master of horror. The beloved mangaka knows that there is no better time for a scare than when the audience is comfortable and episode two is when the shit hit the fan so hard that the feces wasn’t just scattered to the wind. No, it was blended on a subatomic level to make a shit smoothie unlike any the world had previously known about.

I’m not really a professional journalist in any capacity so I don’t have the connections or ability to discern who is really to blame about the descent into abysmal quality that started with episode two of Uzumaki. Uzumaki’s executive director, Tom DeMarco, revealed in a series of vague BlueSky posts that “we” were screwed over and that he couldn’t talk about the nature of exactly what went down. I’ve got an image of them below for your reading pleasure so you can see the exact nature of vague blaming that DeMarco is employing.

I’ve read a few other pieces by animators including some tweets by Henry Thurlow who points the blame clearly at the western producers for the bastardization of the anime and the outcome we’ve seen. I’m a huge cynic for my western media entertainment overlords so I’m keen to think he might be right but until solid proof comes out, it’ll be just another mystery of the spiral for everyone involved. For the time being, it seems we’ll not really be able to surmise the exact reasoning or who is at fault for the blatant decline in Uzumaki’s animation.

That’s enough foreplay though. I’m sure if you’re here that you want to know how much dogshit this canine known as Uzumaki actually succeeded at plopping on the bedroom floor, right? Quite frankly, it’s an impressive amount for any dog or just any human and it all actually starts with episode one.

Episode one of Uzumaki is movie quality animation. It is slow careful movements of measured despair weighed out in small ounces that feel purposefully languid. You would think that with the color palette of just black and white that Uzumaki would be at a disadvantage for visual fidelity but that is so not the case for the premiere episode. Characters will have white outlines as they stand outside as if they were pulled straight from a manga panel and the usage of greyscale for some of the more horrific reveals is at the pinnacle of achievement for the media. One of my little kinks is that I’m kind of a sucker for beautiful mouth animations and just beholding the sight of these perfect lip animations was enough to make me gasp in fear. It was like I was a horny teenager in the 90s and I was just allowed to witness a fully naked Lara Croft with how in awe I was. There are refined visuals to every scene with characters having almost the very same etchings that Ito would draw them with making it really seem as if the manga was brought to life from a Lovecraftian curse itself. To reiterate, this first episode would not look out of place in a movie theater. The sublime details and methodical animation provides such an air of horror for this episode that shows what all of Ito’s prior adaptations really were missing: craftsmanship. Ito’s work is art where a page turn is the only thing saving you from a visage of revulsion that will infect your nightmares and haunt your waking mind so this anime has to instill that quality as well. The first episode succeeds in almost every way barring a few nitpicks that are probably nothing more than my own hang ups like the strange appearance of the typhoons in the water and the interesting hair patterns that were mildly distracting. The first episode of Uzuamaki is an almost perfect adaptation and I don’t think anyone should you judge you harshly if you stopped there. If anything, they should applaud you and your ability to look out for your own self preservation. It only gets worse.

I’ll let you in on a small little secret: I ORIGINALLY didn’t think episode two was THAT bad. I had watched the first episode of Uzumaki in passing and then waited for the rest of the episodes to drop so I could binge it. The memory of that first episode had long since departed from my mind and I thought episode two looked crappy but it wasn’t THAT ugly, right? We were all just dogpiling for fun, right? Watching the first episode again instantly dispelled those foolish thoughts.

I used to love watching seasonal anime on the regular when I started my first podcast. You sometimes got a steaming pile of anime where the only goal seemed to make enough animation to survive another grueling week and it was a fun time regardless. I had kind of grown accustomed to mediocre animation that seems to nothing more than serve another weekly episode. CG was just a sometimes necessary evil and it was easy to tune out as long as what I was watching had enough entertainment in the story department. Weekly anime production is a hill that only those who want to sacrifice their body at the alter of dedication can do. I say all that because what Uzumaki does after episode two might be forgiven if UZUMAKI HAD NOT BEEN IN PRODUCTION SINCE 2019. I’m fully aware that it wasn’t CONSTANTLY being worked on but regardless Uzumaki is not flying by the seat of its pants on a wing and a prayer and the legal amount of caffeine a drink can provide like some other shows and their weekly production schedule. Episode two and onward of Uzumaki degrades in almost every single way possible that an anime can falter in. It’s almost as if an entirely different team took hold of Uzumaki’s production and hadn’t seen the work on episode one. Hell, I would honestly bet that only one person on staff had even read Uzumaki with how lacking in that essential Ito energy the following episodes have.

Here’s the thing about Uzumaki: it easily stops being horror when you explain it out loud. “Yeah and then they become snail people… yeah that’s before the pregnant women all become mosquito people and start hunting for blood… no it’s not before the lighthouse that literally melts people with its light”. It sounds hugely absurd and Ito’s talents are what salvage a silly plot and turn it into an actual horror piece. Uzumaki and its trash bargain basement 3D “animation” that looks like the staff at Xavier: Renegade Angel had a go at anime does not grant the plot the weight it deserves. I, the viewer, become painfully aware how stupid Uzumaki actually is. A man becoming so obsessed with spirals that he becomes a spiral himself and seals his body away in a cask actually manages to be a horror set piece when talent is what is driving the anime car. It becomes the ramblings of a sugar overdosed toddler when it isn’t. The animation belittles the horror as weird 3D models run around in place on screen and what little pieces of traditional animation there are serve nothing but crumbs.

I’m complaining about the animation a lot but does this anime actually serve to adapt Uzumaki’s story as a whole? I answer your question with a shrug and a loud “EHHHHHHHHHHHHH” in response. I reread Uzumaki shortly after finishing the series and can tell you that the anime attempts to give you every single highlight of the manga as quickly and effectively as it can. Here’s the thing again though: this is a horror manga and horror isn’t about quick and easy. It’s about building a slow immense feeling of dread that climaxes into horror. Uzumaki, post episode one, rushes with such a seemingly deliberate speed that it feels every climax is premature and there just to reach to the next strange story. There is no build up of the horrors. They are just there in sequence for us to witness as conscripted by a writer and the atmosphere of dread wanes as a result. Mommy Adult Swim said every cosmic horror had to have its turn on the Xbox and so they’re given a turn to play Halo and trot off quickly home after dying rather quickly. The moments of horror from such standout moments like the mushroom babies that appear in episode three are swiftly tossed aside for the next horror and nothing every has time to resonate with a viewer like me. I was fearful when I heard that Uzumaki was only going to have four episodes but hope still sprung from my willing breast. I thought 40 minute long episodes would suffice to give due time to every chapter and I was hugely and irrevocably wrong. Episode four went so fast that I was surprised to remind myself that it comprises the last third of the Viz edition of the manga.

So what is the purpose of Uzumaki now that it’s over and we’re all left drenched in sweat, shame, and sadness? Adult Swim now has something in its pocket to lovingly run every Halloween when it wants to give the weebs something to watch. That’s the only purpose I could foresee it having because no one, unless they have an insatiable apatite for disappointment and misery, should watch more than the first episode of Uzumaki. The love for Ito’s work is so quintessentially in the DNA of that first episode that I would honestly call it awe inspiring if it was the only piece of media made from this cruel production. It would’ve been just a flash in the pan spark of shining inspiration that Ito’s work could find way in the media of anime and that love really is out there and maybe we could give peace a chance and so on and so forth. It just sucks that episodes two through four exist to prove the opposite though: that cash money rule everything around you and nothing gold can stay and all your friends will die someday. I know it’ll be a cliche thing to say but the real horror of Uzumaki was just how god awful it got out of nowhere. The real spiral into madness was this show and all that. I hope we find out someday just where everything went wrong just so there can be some closure over this whole thing. As it stands, Uzumaki will stand in the annals of anime history as just another huge fall off for users on Twitter to mock and berate. I mean, that PNG from the final episode will never leave my mind and maybe that’s the real horror.