English Dub Season Review: Uzumaki

Overview (Spoilers Below):

The citizens of Kurouzu-cho are plagued by a supernatural curse involving spirals, causing people to become either obsessed with or paranoid about them.  High-school teenager Kirie Goshima (Abby Trott) and her boyfriend, Shuichi Saito (Robbie Daymond), attempt to survive the curse before it overtakes them.

Our Take:

Every October, I always take it upon myself to watch multiple horror films and television shows, whether they’re classics or recent releases.  Some weren’t as nightmare-inducing as others, but most are at their best when they balance genuine terror with good storytelling.  Of course, most horror movies that people recently remember are the ones produced by Blumhouse, which is known for producing schlocky quantity over quality.  There are a few diamonds worth remembering, but besides them, the horror studio’s track record is impressive for the wrong reasons.

But that’s not what this review is about.  It’s about the latest addition to the supernatural horror lineup that’ll make people not look at spirals the same way again.  More importantly, it’s also an anime adaptation that manga fans have been waiting for since its debut in 1998.  I’m referring to Junji Ito’s magnum opus, Uzumaki, a psychological horror manga depicting a small town’s citizens going batshit insane over spirals.  This isn’t the first time the manga has been adapted for the media, as it was previously adapted into a live-action film in 2000 helmed by Akihiro Higuchi, aka “Higuchinsky”.  While the movie deviated from the source material, especially its ending, it was seen as a serviceable adaptation by critics and audiences.  Twenty-four years after its release, we now have an official anime that seems to have stayed true to the manga’s roots, ranging from the art style to the creepy-as-hell narrative.

The Uzumaki anime was actually my first exposure to the source material, so I’m not technically the best person to ask whether this is the true adaptation of the manga.  But, I will say this: as a casual reviewer, I found this four-episode miniseries to be one hell of an experience.  Unfortunately, it did have one noticeable issue that left it shy of greatness: the animation.  The miniseries was initially announced to be animated by Drive, but that wasn’t the case.  Instead, it was produced by two animation studios: Fugaku for the first and last episodes and Akatsuki for episodes two and three.  The anime was also made in black and white, further emphasizing its graphic art style and even its discomforting imagery, which immediately reminded me of Robert Eggers’s “The Lighthouse”.  It’s certainly effective in envisioning its unnerving presentation and character designs, but the stuff that happens behind the scenes was enough to notice its inconsistency.

The first episode of Uzumaki showcased a stunning and immersive animation style consisting of smooth textures and character movements, adding to the creepiness of the show’s imagery.  This would’ve been a surefire sign that the series is going to be another anime diamond in the rough.  However, that all changed once I started watching the remaining episodes, and not for the better.  While it retained the impressive presentation and some effective David Lynch-inspired creepiness, the fluidity of the character movements and action got immediately lost in the sea of spirals.  It’s almost like the characters were replaced by JPEGs that were pasted into the environments, with the noticeable example being Shuichi falling into the abyss in episode four.  If it’s intended to add to the show’s uncanny valley, that would be one thing.  But for the style to be inconsistent throughout the entire season?  That’s a different story.  This may be due to the studio not giving the animation departments enough time to fix those issues before its release, which makes sense considering how poorly the animation artists have been treated recently.

Thankfully, I usually judge a show based on everything else, not just the animation quality alone.  If I were to dismiss it only because of the inconsistent style, I wouldn’t be a good critic, would I?  With or without its animation hiccups, Uzumaki, from a narrative sense, is more of a house-of-horrors experience than a character-driven miniseries, and a pretty compelling one at that.  Each episode has Shuichi and Kirie encountering multiple effects of the town’s spiral curse, with each one being more messed up than the last.  It plays off the same way as any other supernatural horror project story-wise, but with more A24 vibes than the ones from Blumhouse, and the characters don’t offer much depth to their arcs.  The show’s final episode also didn’t pack as much of a terrifying impact as the previous ones regarding the scare factor.

Regardless of its flaws, I was consistently entertained by the anime adaptation of Uzumaki for its world-building and nightmarish sequences that would make for a decent midnight watch for horror enthusiasts.  The animation was well-crafted for its black-and-white presentation and disturbing imagery, especially in the first episode, and the direction was mildly effective for its creep factor and storytelling.  However, it makes this all the more unfortunate when the remaining episodes struggled to maintain that consistency when it comes to the animation having uncanny JPEG movements.  It didn’t deteriorate from my experience, but it was definitely a shame that the animation department got screwed over by the studio’s unfair conditions, at least from what I heard from sources.  Instead of being another crowning achievement in horror anime, I would describe Uzumaki as a good enough display of supernatural and psychological terror suitable for Halloween viewing.