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Horror anime, worth the wait

Uzumaki premieres Saturday, September 28th at 12:30 pm ET on Adult Swim. Both the Japanese and English dubs will be available to stream on Max the next day. The English-language encores will air every Thursday at 12:30 p.m. starting October 3rd.

Adult Swim's adaptation of Junji Ito's 1998 manga Uzumaki was worth the wait, which is probably a huge shock given other attempts to portray it that way Putting stories in motion. Although there is a winding path to liberation and emerging in a world that means a lot more warped than at the start of productionThe anime shows a clear understanding of what makes its source material work while making necessary, perhaps hasty, changes for the pace of television. Luckily, it still retains most of its twisted spirit.

Uzumaki is widely considered the mangaka's most important work (although for me it's the spooky short story “The Enigma of Amigara Fault”), a unique read that's gruesome and tense, yet balanced with some camp silliness. It's a work that includes disgusting deformations of bodies and, inexplicably, a chapter about how sometimes your new haircut can be a little too sexy. The animated series he inspired revolves around two teenagers who notice strange happenings in their hometown of Kurouzu-cho. Shuichi Saito is particularly concerned about his father's growing obsession with IUDs. All the lines swirling around himself, wherever they are, attract his utmost concentration and attention. The manga tackles each new strange discovery in the city one at a time, while the Adult Swim version threads some of the storylines from all over in this first episode, adapting some of the early chapters almost entirely and introducing plot points from further down the timeline. While none of the material feels out of place, this episode certainly tries to do too much at once. In just 22 minutes there are four separate storylines, three of which could probably make great episodes if given time, and could probably have been found more breathing room later. (It can also be argued that changing the chronology of some events creates a slight discrepancy in the plot, but that's up to the video essayists.)

If you're only passively familiar with the manga, you may be familiar with some of its most iconic images – and you'll see many of them in this 20-minute premiere, given loving attention and additional, horrific, gory details from the extra set. One of them made me physically cringe – that's a positive. Adult Swim pulls no punches with its depiction of graphic damage here, but its Uzumaki is also playfully silly. Scenes like a slow-moving boy trying to return a volleyball might seem odd together, but they're a reprieve in an intense highlight reel of some of Ito's strangest images.

Animation is at its best when it adds extra flair to images that are already terrible on the page. There's a moment where a character's tongue becomes unnaturally large and it's so cool to see it moving. In some shots, the characters move as if they were rotoscoped, and that eerie feeling of being real but not real worked well to keep me on edge in many of the episode's less dramatic scenes.

In condensing and interweaving these chapters, some parts of the characterization are skipped. Shuichi's mother doesn't have much to do in the first half and the extent of the father's obsession is poorly fleshed out. I didn't particularly miss these excerpts, but I mention them to make it clear that this is not a one-to-one translation of Ito's manga. Smart changes to ease the pacing have resulted in one of my favorite additions: a brief shot of the main character, Kirie, unsuccessfully trying to keep up with the unnatural speed of Shuichi's father's disturbing eye movements. It's a sweet moment of showing who this person is, and it's perfectly executed for the screen.

I watched the episode in both available languages ​​(spare me the “Sub or Dub?” comment, I understand) and it works well in both cases. The Japanese version has a good voice cast, but no shining star. The English dub actors provide standard booth reads, but there's an episode-defining performance from Aaron LaPlante, who captures a sense of obsessive excitement in Shuichi's father that's all the more unsettling because you don't know how intensely he's acting busy with something that is not important at all. Watch what you would normally choose, but I don't want you to miss how good LaPlante's scenes can be.

Uzumaki was worth the wait.

From the screenshots accompanying this review, you've probably noticed that Uzumaki is presented entirely in black and white, replicating the original manga. It looks cool, but it's hard to say if it's necessary. It's not like it's the core of Ito's vision: the Viz hardcover edition of Uzumaki features incredible full-color splash pages. This choice gives the anime a distinct level-headedness and touch of prestige, although I think it's more of a marketing gimmick than anything else. I don't think it's better to avoid color, I don't think it's essential to capture the tone, I don't think it's either good or bad. I think it's just how it is Is.

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