'Uzumaki' Reviews: "Adult Swim's Uzumaki does the impossible in creating a worthy anime for one of Junji Ito's scariest stories"

         On September 29, 2024, Cartoon Network premiered 'Uzumaki', which has earned rave reviews, currently holding at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. In the animated series, "Hair twisting, bodies intertwining, spirals are developing all over the town." The ensemble cast includes Shin'ichirô Miki, Uki Satake, Mariya Ise, Mika Doi, Toshio Furukawa, and Takashi Matsuyama. But what did the critics say?

        Mat Jones of IGN Movies says, "Adult Swim’s adaptation of Junji Ito’s 1998 manga Uzumaki was worth the wait, which is probably a massive shock if you’re familiar with other attempts to put his stories into motion. Despite taking a winding path to release and emerging in a world that’s much more warped than when it began production, the anime shows a clear understanding of what makes its source material work while making necessary, perhaps rushed, alterations for the pacing of television. Fortunately, it still retains most of its twisted spirit." Adding, "Uzumaki is widely thought of as the mangaka's most important work (though it's the chilling short story The Enigma of Amigara Fault for me), a unique read that’s gruesome and tense and yet balanced with pockets of camp silliness. It’s a work that includes sickening deformations of bodies, and, inexplicably, a chapter about how sometimes your new haircut can be a little too sexy. The animated series it inspired centers on two teenagers who begin to notice strange events in their hometown of Kurouzu-cho, with Shuichi Saito especially worried about his father’s growing obsession with spirals; any lines that swoop around on themselves, wherever they’re found, gain his utmost focus and attention. The manga tackles each new weird discovery in town one by one, while the Adult Swim version threads a few of the plot lines from all over in this first episode, adapting some of the early chapters almost entirely and introducing plot points from further down the timeline. Though none of the material feels out of place, this episode is certainly trying to do too much at once. In just 22 minutes there are four separate plots, where three of them could probably make great episodes if given time on their own, and one could probably have found more breathing room further down the line. (There’s also an argument to be made that changing the chronology of some events makes for a slight plot-discrepancy, but that’s one for the video essayists.)"

       Evan Valentine of ComicBook.com notes, "Adult Swim's Uzumaki does the impossible in creating a worthy anime for one of Junji Ito's scariest stories." Continuing, "Uzumaki's plot is a strong one, in terms of Junji Ito's overall horror library. Often, the series is considered one of the horror artist's greatest works, and for good reason. While it does have its two main characters in Shuichi and Kirie, it will often branch out from them and tell the stories of handfuls of characters unfortunate enough to be cursed in rather unique ways. This works in a way to create an anthology-style tale that is also cohesive in its overall plot. Shuichi, for example, is dragged into a specific curse thanks to his father's obsession with spirals, as the young boy even explains to his girlfriend how ridiculous it sounds on the surface, while documenting how terrifying it is to see it with his own eyes. That's Ito's work in a nutshell; concepts that, on paper, sound hilarious but put into practice, make for the stuff of nightmares."

Photo by Ajeet Mestry on Unsplash

        Elijah Gonzalez of Paste Magazine says, "Through sometimes wacky and always unsettling sights, we’re sucked into the swirling, hypnotic pull of what feels like a collective delusion. If the series can maintain its presentation and momentum, it has the makings of an anime horror classic." Concluding, And, of course, one of the most striking elements here is the enigma around its central spiral symbol, which continues to suck unwitting souls into its thrall. Working in the realm of “messed-up little town” fiction, these events inspire a mixture of curiosity and suffocation, not only getting across compulsive phobias and gruesome sights, but also a coiling fear of the unknown. Why does this symbol do this to people, and is any of this happening for a reason? This premiere conveys a sense of slow-build calamity around spirals that seems all but inescapable, and at one point, Shuichi asks Kirie why they don’t just get up and leave this cursed place behind. But for a reason that’s hard to explain, that doesn’t seem like an option (beyond the fact there wouldn’t be much of a story if they did), and it’s as if they’re caught up in an invisible vortex. Like many, it seems they’ll never escape the orbit of this town they were born in, and perhaps that’s the scariest detail of all. All that said, perhaps my biggest worry at this point is that, while the manga isn’t very long, adapting all of it into four short, 30-minute episodes may be difficult, especially because this premiere only covered three of 19 chapters. Related to this, there was already a touch of awkward pacing with how they spliced together the plotlines from the first two chapters and the third, so that will be something to keep an eye on. Additionally, while the series looks great so far, its detail-intensive approach could be quite difficult to maintain for the full run, something I’m wary of since it’s common for anime premieres to look noticeably better than what follows."