The long-awaited Adult Swim adaptation of Uzumaki, the horror manga by Junji Ito, has fans twisting themselves into knots in anticipation. While Ito’s most iconic work has been adapted before, the prospect of an achingly detailed recreation of his immersive drawings via the medium of animation just hits differently.
Uzumaki imagines a seemingly normal Japanese town that becomes engulfed in spirals. These simple shapes turn sinister, whether it’s a teenage girl’s out-of-control curly hair, boys turning into slimy snails, or whirlpools that consume all who fall into them. One of the most mundane parts of life, a naturally occurring shape you can find practically everywhere, becomes a hellish curse that engulfs all who fall into its spin. The four-part series (critics received only the first part before the premiere) is an achingly faithful recreation of the manga, panel-for-panel in most scenes, with Ito’s hyper-detailed art style given a kind of uncanny fluidity through movement. The combination of hand-drawn animation, CGI, and motion capture gives Uzumaki a decidedly unreal sensation, as though everyone moves just a little too smoothly to be truly human.
