You rate episode 1 of
What is Uzumaki like? Community points: none
©Toonami/Junji Ito/Production IG
If you've read our Most Anticipated Anime of Fall 2024 article or the ANN After Show, you know that expectations are high for Adult Swim's adaptation of Hiroshi Nagahama's Uzumaki anime. The four-episode series has been pushed back multiple times due to the effects of COVID-19, which only serves to heighten anticipation for what, by all accounts, looks to be an adaptation that does justice to Junji Ito's art. Fans of the acclaimed horror manga creator have been burned in the past, but the trailers for Nagahama and Production I.G.'s adaptation, backed by songs by Hereditary's Colin Stetson, are incredibly promising.
The show's opening credits won't be out for a few more days, but having watched the first episode, I can assure anime and horror fans that it looks and sounds fantastic. Unfortunately, its only flaw is a serious one; you can't speed up the scares.
The first volume of Uzumaki covers manga chapters 1 through 3, which mainly concern Shuichi and Azami Kurotani's parents. To give a brief summary, Uzumaki opens with Kirie Goshima as she stands on a small hill overlooking the ocean in her hometown of Kurouzu-cho. Kirie is our point of view character, and the opening scene is presented as if she is looking back at a series of strange events she encountered in town. We then pick up on these strange events as Shuichi, Kirie's longtime boyfriend, explains that his father has recently become obsessed with spiral shapes.
Many of the manga's iconic images come from these first three chapters, and they include most of what's shown in the trailer: Shuichi's father's crooked tongue, his unsightly eyes, and his eventual fate of becoming a human cinnamon roll in the same bathtub he ordered. These are incredibly disturbing moments on their own, but the first episode of Uzumaki is anything but unsettling. There's no space for the audience to settle in and notice the strange spiraling obsession that's gripping the townspeople. Everything about Shuichi's father is laid out and wrapped up in the first 10 minutes of the episode. The second half focuses on Azami, and the audience is asked to believe that she meets and becomes obsessed with Shuichi for the remaining 12 minutes of screen time. If this pace continues for the remaining three episodes, Uzumaki risks becoming a parody of manga references for fans to pay attention to.
The narrative issues in this episode can be traced back to what had to be cut from the runtime. It's understandable that with limited resources, the cuts were made. The Uzumaki manga is over 600 pages long and includes over a dozen bizarre twists and turns; it was never going to be a 1:1 animated recreation with a runtime of around 100 minutes. The staff had to make choices, but in rushing through some of the manga's most famous images, they lacked the shock value of the original. If we look at Azami's original story specifically, her obsession with Shuichi escalates after he refuses to make up excuses to meet him and buys an apartment in town to spy on him during her final confrontation. That build-up, which could have been translated on screen by weaving her story together to wrap up in later episodes, was cut.
Oddly enough, Kirie also seems to have suffered the most from the rewrites. Junji Ito isn't exactly known for writing particularly compelling protagonists, as they're usually the type to have weird things happen to them (if they're not excellent villains). Still, Kirie has some personality, initially giving Shuichi much more plausible explanations for the happenings in town. Here, that dialogue is absent, and she becomes a blank slate, another character who faces horrors but lacks any distinct personality.
Despite all my criticisms of the pacing, I can't argue that Uzumaki has a vibe. Nagahama's (expensive) decision to use motion capture for the entire series, build it in CG, and then have the animation team redraw the shots has created something that's unmatched in the anime landscape. Uzumaki is breathtaking because of its smooth, eerie rendering of Junji Ito's artwork. The only aspect that comes close to absolute quality is Stetson's soundtrack, which has the effect of conjuring up a strange spin on something you don't want to confront.
While I didn't get the emotional experience I was hoping for from the Uzumaki premiere, its visual presentation and soundtrack far exceeded my expectations. I'm nervous about how it'll play out because, again, this is a lot of material, and ultimately, there's lore that the anime can either care about or it can stick to its weird event-series approach. Time will tell.
Rating:
Uzumaki is currently airing on Adult Swim and streaming on Max.
