Uzumaki was a long time coming.
Announced back at the 2019 Crunchyroll Expo, Junji Ito’s seminal graphic novel was set to be adapted into a four-episode mini-series for Adult Swim with a tentative release date of 2020. The first-look trailer wouldn’t be released until almost four years later on July 22, 2023, and after years of waiting, the hype couldn’t have been higher.
Uzumaki was finally released on September 28, 2024, and the reviews were … not good. As a fan of the graphic novel, I was actually shocked at how scathing reviewers were of the story, pacing, and especially the animation. Watching the show for myself, I did my best to go in with an open mind and examine the show as both an adaptation of the graphic novel, and its own take on the source material.
The Story
I’m going to do my best to avoid spoilers here, as the graphic novel is a great read that benefits from knowing as little as possible going in. That being said, the story overall is nothing special. What really draws people in is Ito’s unique and haunting art style, turning asinine and even silly ideas into something insidious and disturbing.
This is the first place the show falls flat. The story of Uzumaki, like many manga, doesn’t follow a Western three-act structure. It more closely resembles a four-act structure like kishōtenketsu, and as a result, the second act takes up most of the runtime. It spends a lot of time in the town of Kurouzu, exploring multiple side characters and their interactions with the spiral. Because of this, Uzumaki feels less like a book and more like a season of CW’s Supernatural. Many chapters function as their own mini-story within the larger narrative.
The 2024 adaptation views these events differently. Instead of events meant to center the town’s inhabitants and show the far-reaching consequences spreading from one person to another, these are simply checkboxes of events to be included. Honestly, the show would have benefited more from simply choosing to not include some of the chapters, rather than absolutely insisting that nothing be left out from the graphic novel.
The end result feels less like a coherent story and more like one of those “The Plot of Movie Explained in 60 Seconds” videos. The characters, especially Kirie and Shuichi, have no time to sit with anything that happens, because it’s immediately onto the next horrible thing. The audience becomes numb to any of the horror of the story itself, because the pacing is so breakneck that nothing feels like it matters. It’s so disappointing because I found myself bored by the same stories that kept me so engaged in the graphic novel.
The Animation
The one thing that most reviewers (myself included) couldn’t overlook is the animation. Hiroshi Nagahama (Detroit Metal City, Mushishi) was the animation director for episodes one and four only, while there is no animation director credited for episodes two and three. While the first and last episodes look good or serviceable at moments, the quality tanks in the episodes with no credited animation director. The mouth animations in particular between episodes are jarring, as we go from having fully drawn lips and teeth to empty black holes that alternate between mouth-closed and mouth-open like some messed up Jim Henson puppets. It’s really hard to look at.
While I found myself lulled into the jerky and sometimes even silly-looking art style (Berserk 2016 came to mind), there were moments of Uzumaki that were borderline unwatchable. The combination of 2D, 3D, and rotoscoping is extremely effective at moments (particularly in episode one) but at other times, it gives the character’s movements a very uncanny valley quality. I felt more like I was watching one of Joel Haver’s Youtube videos, which certainly pulled me out of the more intense scenes.
It was especially sad to me when Junji Ito’s original designs were dumbed down to caricatures of the graphic novel’s art. The skin disease towards the end of the graphic novel was one of the chapters that really stuck with me, but in Uzumaki, it is shown so briefly that viewers who didn’t read the graphic novel probably didn’t even notice the small spirals inlaid in every grotesque boil.
Required Reading?
I know I’ve been mentioning the graphic novel a lot, but I’m unsure if I would have been able to follow Uzumaki without having read it. The episodic chapters, followed by the show in episodes two and three, are a mish-mash of all of these stories thrown in a blender. They’re so incoherent that by the end, it feels like a game of Where’s Waldo watching for characters you’ve seen before, but whose stories haven’t yet been resolved. Chances are, they’ll be resolved by a 30-second clip where the character walks on screen, does something grotesque, and dies immediately.
If I hadn’t read the graphic novel, I don’t know if I would have remembered Jack-In-The-Box by the time his story unceremoniously resolves at the end of episode three. I might have had to really think about who Sekino was when we finally see her corpse a full episode after she is introduced.
This wouldn’t be an issue if the pacing weren’t so fast, but with story events and horrors happening in every moment (and I do mean every moment), without my prior knowledge, I would have been completely lost by the last episode.
TL;DR
Uzumaki is a mess. The pacing is a mess, jamming all the events of a 19-chapter book into less than an hour and a half of television. The animation only makes it worse, turning some of the novel’s emotional scenes into meme-able clips.
If I had to say something good about it, I think the performances are fine. There’s no Yuki Kaji in this cast, but everyone does enough of a good job to make their characters believable. The background art looks good, though I wonder how much of it was just taken directly from the graphic novel.
To be fair to Adult Swim’s anime division, there’s evidence that studio interference ruined the hard work and creative vision of Uzumaki’s team. Still, we have to be honest about what we got, and what we got is very, very bad.
It will be a long time (if ever) before we get another Uzumaki adaptation. Junji Ito, like other mangakas, has the problem of being too good. His art is detailed and hard to adapt, and with the amount of time and resources Adult Swim’s team put into this project that ultimately bombed, it’s easy to see why another studio won’t be gunning for the rights.
If you do choose to watch it, I strongly recommend reading Junji Ito’s graphic novel before you do. It will give you the framework to understand the story and also show you the monsters as they are truly meant to be seen.