The anime adaptation of Junji Ito’s seminal horror manga Uzumaki was announced at Crunchyroll Expo in 2019. Five years is one hell of a long time to wait for a four-episode mini-series, but five pandemic years? I haven’t experienced a wait this excruciating since Kingdom Hearts 3, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:we all know how that turned out.
A normal person would﷽ probably have picked up on some red flags at some point over the years, but there’s nothing normal about my love for Uzumaki. I was 12 when🔥 I first discovered Ito’s bizarre and unnerving recounting of a rural town cursed by malevolent spirals and it scared me more than anything I’ve ever seen before, and though I’m an adult now, it still does.
This was writte☂n before episode two premiere, in wh💃ich the animation quality falls off a cliff.
Uzumaki’s unique combination of body horror and cosmic horror is genre-defining, and any ada🃏ptation of it would automatically be at least decent simply by virtue of ꦦreminding me how great the book is. At least, that’s what I’ve been telling myself for the last half-decade.
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I’ve al👍so been telling myself that all the delays and production issues were rooted in the studios' (plural) desire to make this the best adaptation it could be. It was understandable when the show was delayed out of its original 2020 release window during the pandemic. With each new delay however, it became more unclear what exactly was going on behind the scenes.
We still don’t know the details, but something strange definitely went down. When the series ജwas first announced, Japanese animation studio Drive was developing it. Four yea♍rs later, a new trailer also credited a newer animation support studio called Akatsuki. The first episode, which finally premiered on Max this week, credits neither studio, but rather another called Fugaku. I don’t know all that much about the Japanese animation studio industry, but considering the series was delayed at least four times, I think it's safe to say there were some problems behind the scenes.
You can see some of those problems manifest on screen. While the first episode does a great job reproducing Ito’s signature aesthetic and is as faithful to the soꦰurce material as any fan could ask for, there’s also some pretty jarring animation throughout. Ito’s macabre and highly-detailed hand-drawn a🥃esthetic is iconic, and for the most part the show does a great job matching his style - going so far as to recreate most of the first volume panel by panel - but in motion, the whole aesthetic often falls apart.
A lot of the first episode is clearly computer-animated, though it's meant to look entirely hand-animated. In static shots, especially those pulled directly from the book, everything looks strikingly similar to Ito’s work. But whenever the camera moves, or characters are rotated, you can see all the digital fingerprints clear as day. It’s all a bit wonky, not in an intentional or artistic way, but in an overworked/underpaid animators k💝ind of way.
And yet, filled with an abundance of cope for this show, there’s a part of me that appreciates the cracks in Uzumaki’s facade. Whenever a camera move distorts the shapes or a character moves in an odd and unsettling way, I’m delighted. The show’s moments of failure, when the digital process overrides the handmade aesthetic, send signals to the uncanny valley detectors in your brain. It’s almost better that it looks a♊ little bit wrong at times because it subtly adds to the distress.
I’ve read Uzumaki dozens of times throughout my life. I know every panel of every chapter like the back of my hand. When I first read it I found it shocking and disturbing, but now it has become a source of familiarity and comfort. As much as I would have enjoyed a perfect one-to-one TV adaptation, I’m enjoying the moments when the unexpected happens. It’s keeping me on my toes and giving me the feeling of anxiety that reading Uzumaki gave me when I was 12. I’m not saying the studio behind the show made it look bad on purpose, but there’s l♎ots of happy accidents in art, and this might be one of them.
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