Adult Swim’s Uzumaki Adaptation Is Pure Spiraling Dread
Photo Courtesy of Adult Swim
When it comes to horror manga, there’s arguably no bigger name than Junji Ito, a comic artist whose long list of nightmarish creations have haunted countless readers’ dreams for decades. But despite Ito’s popularity and ubiquity in the space, there’s never been a particularly good anime adaptation of his work—this certainly hasn’t been for lack of trying, and whether it’s 2018’s anemic Junji Ito Collection or 2023’s equally unimpressive Junji Ito Maniac: Tales of the Macabre, these attempts were unable to capture the specific ambiance that makes his stories simultaneously absurd and unsettling. However, that drought seems to have ended with Adult Swim and Drive studio’s take on Ito’s magnum opus, Uzumaki. At least in the first episode provided for review, its intensely faithful art style, haunting sound design, and excellent translation of the manga’s scares suck us into a whirlpool of slow-burn dread.
This horror tale takes place in Kurouzu-cho, an isolated coastal town in Japan, as Kirie (Uki Satake in the Japanese Dub, Abby Trott in the English Dub) begins to notice something strange—everywhere she looks, there are spirals. Her boyfriend, Shuichi (Shinichiro Miki, Robbie Daymond), takes this observation further, explaining how his dad has been completely obsessed with the pattern, collecting spiral-shaped objects, refusing to eat food that isn’t in this form, and even rolling his eyes independently to create swirling motions with his body. While Kirie initially laughs this story off, she and Shuichi find these circumstances increasingly difficult to ignore as spiral patterns put this town and its people on a circuitous path toward doom.
If it wasn’t clear, this work is very much playing in the realm of weird fiction, a sub-genre focused on the unknown and inexplicable: in this case, these people aren’t being haunted by imposing creatures like vampires, ghosts, or monsters, but a shape. Despite this seemingly innocuous adversary, it doesn’t take long before the spiral becomes a symbol that isn’t just frightening for these townsfolk, but for the audience as well, as it comes to signal that grotesque body horror is just around the corner.
One of the main reasons this first episode of Uzumaki lands compared to previous takes on the author’s work is because it excellently emulates the intricate linework and deeply disturbing sights from Ito’s panels, painstakingly recreating his upsetting images so they lose none of their original impact. Much of the author’s work relies on building up to grisly, ornately drawn punchlines, usually delivered on a full page spread, and the way this adaptation fastidiously recreates these moments separates it from its lesser peers.
In general, Drive went to great lengths to evoke the manga’s aesthetic by using a black-and-white color scheme that matches the original’s ink illustrations and through involved character designs that are virtually identical to the source material. There’s a reason most anime adaptations change how characters look: detailed designs that work fine on the page become a total headache when they need to be recreated several times per second to make things move. But despite this, Uzumaki looks excellent in motion thanks to its uncannily smooth animation, with grounded movement that pulls us in and contrasts nicely against these otherworldly nightmares.
The score and sound design similarly help elevate things, and whether it’s the eerie instrumentation of Colin Stetson’s soundtrack or the disquieting cracks and pops as eyeballs spin and bodies contort into unnatural shapes, the involved work here gets across why it took so long for this four-episode series to come out (it was originally announced over five years ago).