The First Episode of ‘Uzumaki’ Was Amazing: What Happened With the Rest?

Manga fans have waited many years for an anime adaptation of Uzumaki, Junji Ito’s horror masterpiece that has now become the stuff of TikTok reading trends. How is it that perhaps the most famous work of horror in the medium, one that is beloved among readers of all languages, went without the series it deserved (we all agreed that the rubbish live-action version doesn’t count.) When Adult Swim finally greenlit an adaptation, it was followed by years of waiting as it went through delays and all manner of production hell. It seemed worth the anticipation once the first of four episodes premiered. Uzumaki was a triumph! The first part was everything that fans were hoping for. Finally, we had the Ito adaptation we deserved.

And then we saw the second episode and collectively sighed, ‘Ugh, nevermind.’

The slump in quality between those episodes was staggering. It was like the horse drawing meme. Viewers wondered if the production blew its entire budget on the first episode and then needed to scrape together the rest of the season with pennies they’d found under the couch (critics only received screeners for Episode 1 before the premiere, which was probably a warning.) Everything seemed worse: the lip sync (for both dub and sub), the animation, the pacing, the redo of Ito’s highly distinctive style.

Before we can look at what went wrong, we must interrogate what went right in Episode 1. Ito fans really only wanted to see the comics brought to life with the same detail and dread that made the manga so readable. They nailed that in the first 23 or so minutes. The animation was a combination of hand-drawn, 3D, and motion capture, a strange brew that brought to mind the early days of the medium when rotoscoping was the norm. It felt ideal for Uzumaki, a story that takes the mundane and morphs it into something abhorrent (you’ll never be able to look at spirals in the same way again.) The ways that characters walked, the way that curiously curled blades of grass moved in the wind, felt just a little too real for a cartoon. That uncanny quality nailed the ways that Ito’s work captures the terror of the safe and ordinary betraying us (and it was made all the scarier by the black-and-white style, absent of colour like the manga.) By Episode 2, the movements were janky, even outright lazy. It felt as though entire frames of animation had been omitted. What should have made us shudder, like the human snails slithering across the window pane, became comical. If it were a fan animation, you’d admire the ingenuity. Otherwise, it was just sad.

Indeed, a lot of those crucial details and minute shades of weird were totally absent post-Episode 1. In Episode 2, there’s a very famous moment from the manga where a major character goes to a lighthouse. On the page, the sketchy qualities of light, dark, and terror are almost overwhelming. It’s hyper-real, something that is part of the Ito style, like when you look too closely at something and realize just how disturbing it truly is.) On-screen, it was dishearteningly basic. It seemed as though they’d gotten the foundations right then stopped and didn’t return to finish the job. What’s the point in doing Uzumaki if you’re going to cut so many corners? In the third episode, it swings wildly between looking great and seeming rushed. It’s almost impressive. Clearly, the various studio issues and power struggles led to this erraticism.

Ito’s work is so popular - and so life-ruining - because it finds a way to take things that should seem silly or just daft and make them pure nightmare fuel. In Uzumaki, the concept of a spiral is the stuff of apocalyptic destruction. “The Enigma of Amigara Fault” imagines a mountain full of holes shaped like human beings. Other stories feature balloons shaped like people’s heads that hunt down their doppelgangers, a woman whose body peels away in layers like an onion, and evil fish with metal legs who emit an evil, possibly sentient gas. When you describe these plots to novices, they usually look at you like you’re a bit mad. A friend of mine, after I told her about Uzumaki, and my own responses to it, responded, ‘What, like the spinny things?’ You should feel safe from Ito’s ideas. And yet they worm their way into your psyche. It’s our generation’s version of cosmic horror, of ideas so otherworldly and unavoidable that you cannot help but feel infinitesimally pointless by comparison. The Lovecraft comparisons are apt, although Ito’s cats have far more normal names than Howard’s.

That might be what makes his work so tricky to adapt. It’s so specific not only to him but to the medium. Reading Ito offers endless manga versions of the jump scare, where you slowly turn to the next page in fear for what will come next. We can imagine how it moves, how it sounds, how it feels. It is true that what we imagine is often far scarier than what we see.

But Uzumaki DID succeed in bringing to life that which seemed indelibly of the page. They just didn’t maintain it for longer than 23 minutes, and it’s baffling that they couldn’t pull it off. It truly feels like they either ran out of money or got bored. Whatever problems kept this thing in production hell for so long left their impact on the final product, as so often happens. It’s a shame. And what we’re left with is an adaptation that even I’m not scared of.

Uzumaki is currently showing on Adult Swim.