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Uzumaki recently concluded its run on Adult Swim’s Toonami block and it was a rollercoaster of a ride. This show, which had a long production phase and plenty of hype surrounding it, I feel like it didn’t get a fair shake. Since I know the conversation around this show will focus on episode two, let’s jump forward and start the discussion there. Episode two of Uzumaki is easily the weakest episode of the entire series, although I have very different opinions on it than what the majority think. What most viewers got out of it was a show that languished in development hell and those viewers were expecting every episode to be a well-animated masterpiece. Episode two wasn’t that, presenting an installment riddled with stiff animation and poorly drawn frames. As a result, episode two has become infamous. It didn’t help that producer/Toonami co-creator Jason DeMarco wrote in a now deleted Bluesky post that they were “screwed over” during the production.
All that comment did was add fuel to the fire and I think that did far more damage to Adult Swim’s upcoming anime originals than it did to Uzumaki itself, because over the past week, I have seen nothing but pessimistic comments over future originals like Lazarus and Rooster Fighter and how they have little faith in those because of how Uzumaki’s second episode turned out. It’s wild to me that Uzumaki broke that trust so much when series like Rick and Morty The Anime and FLCL Grunge exist, shows I believe are far more horrid in comparison when talking about quality, and those shows told me that Adult Swim is happy to greenlight garbage if it means they can cash in on a name. That said, I think it’s fair that people do feel negatively towards Uzumaki and the Adult Swim anime originals as a whole considering this show took five years to come out! As for Jason’s comments, in my opinion, I do not care who’s to blame for “screwing” the production because everyone shares the blame and I think it’s poor form that he’d point the finger at another person for the way things turned out when he’s a producer on the damn thing! Yes, it sucks that it turned out that way but that doesn’t matter to me. You’ve been promising this product for years and kept your audience waiting and they have every right to blame you for the shortcomings because they make you and your company look incompetent. I have no clue what happened behind the scenes and we’ll perhaps never know unless people who worked on it break NDA, but as I have said, it doesn’t matter to me. Adult Swim, Warner Brothers Discovery, Production IG USA, Jason DeMarco, Maki Terashima-Furuta, the Japanese staff… all of them are at fault for how this show turned out and more specifically how episode two came out. To further prove my point, we had to pull the promo for episode two. We were messaged by one of the production staff on Twitter via direct messages to pull the episode two promo because Adult Swim aired the wrong version. That came as a surprise to us, but we did as we were asked and removed it from social media and YouTube despite not knowing what was wrong with it. It only got more confusing when Adult Swim throughout the week kept running the same promo and never removed it from their social media channels. In the end, we never found out what was wrong with it or if anything was ever wrong with it and they may have simply gotten confused? Who knows.
Things like this go to highlight the production issues with this series, and frankly, a better producer would’ve run a tighter ship that wouldn’t have resulted in four episodes taking years to complete. Sure, we were hit with a pandemic in 2020 and I don’t think anyone is going to give you shit for something that was out of your hands like that. But by the time the announcement of a delay came in 2022, a statement that ironically was about “quality” and “not putting out a lesser product,” in hindsight, that statement reeked of incompetence when episode two aired in the state it was in.
However, I think what’s lost in that conversation is the question of “how is the episode on its own without the animation problems?” To me, good animation isn’t the end all, be all, with things like the pacing, characters, and tone/atmosphere being far more important than god-tier animation. You can have good art and well-animated scenes, but if those other areas are shit, it doesn’t matter.
In my opinion, episode two is all over the place, attempting to cram so much of the manga in that it doesn’t have any time for the stories to breathe, which was an equally major problem with Uzumaki’s first episode, but here in episode two it’s the most egregious. There’s too much going on and not enough focus trying to build up these stories, with stories like the hair and the lighthouse chapters playing a strong role in the manga, while in the anime, they are rushed. Not to mention the other things crammed in from the manga, such as, the jack in the box kid and the Romeo and Juliet type story, which never feel fleshed out and feel rather forced rather than allowing the episode to have a stronger focus on one or two things. To me, that is far more of an issue than the mediocre animation which, yes, it takes the viewer out of the experience when the quality of animation is poor, but bad pacing can just as easily ruin a good story.
Thankfully, I do not think the sometimes-rushed pacing of this series killed my enjoyment of it because Uzumaki is one of the best adaptations of a Junji Ito work ever created. I understand that’s not a high bar to clear compared to past attempts, but Uzumaki stands as a great piece of horror and proves that the team that made it understands Junji Ito’s work.
With the Junji Ito Collection that ran on Crunchyroll in 2018, the art, animation, and pacing killed what were otherwise good stories. For example, The Circus Comes to Town is a short story about horrible murders happening at a circus during a show with the ringmaster holding some type of power to cause these incidents. By that small description it sounds interesting, but when watching it, because the production of the Junji Ito Collection was rushed and incompetently assembled, it ruins a decent scary story, and honestly, The Circus Comes to Town is probably one of the better shorts made as part of the collection, but as a whole, the Junji Ito Collection is just unwatchable. I sat through the entire thing recently, and the hype for how bad it is couldn’t be more real. It’s just god awful as art, as a tribute to Junji Ito, and as an attempt at bringing these spooky stories to a wider audience.
As for Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre, I can tell it’s more competently put together than Junji Ito Collection, but the biggest issues here are that it isn’t scary, nor do they commit to a scare. One of the stories, Alley, has a young man move into a home next to a closed off alley. Without giving too much away, some strange noises happen in that alley at night and it could have been a scary tale if it committed to the scare, but instead, the short just ends when the main character lands in the alley and we don’t really see what happens once it hits nightfall. Sure, the audience can infer that a monster or something paranormal happened, but without showing the aftermath, the ending feels incomplete and makes it seem like they are afraid to commit to showing something creepy. Maybe it is just me since I have not read all of Junji Ito’s stories and I’m unsure of how accurate shorts like this are to the source material, but I have read Uzumaki and a couple other short stories written by the man. For the most part, the panels on the pages of the manga and the build up to the scares are incredibly effective. That seems to be an issue when it comes to adapting Ito’s work into any other medium that isn’t manga. His art and storytelling are incredibly detailed, and directly translating those eerie and downright sinister monsters to animation is challenging.
I even managed to sit down and watch the original adaptation of Uzumaki, the live action J-Horror movie from the year 2000. It’s a very mediocre film that on its own is okay but if I’m comparing it to the manga, it barely represents that story except for a few shared story sequences. Much of the movie is spent waiting for something to happen and when it finally does try to scare the viewer, it isn’t scary at all. It’s the equivalent of a little kid hiding and jumping out to scare you: cute the first time but after spending 90 minutes with it, it gets old real fast.
So despite the less-than-successful attempts of the past, Uzumaki’s anime adaptation manages to nail every aspect of Ito’s style while crafting an experience that isn’t 1-to-1 with the original source material, instead acting like more of a best-of compilation. That’s why I started this off by talking about episode two because it is the episode with the most glaring issues. However, I tend to find that the other three episodes are effective in what they are trying to be. Comparing Uzumaki to the other Ito adaptations, it’s not even a contest. This show understands Junji Ito and is genuinely terrifying to watch.
What makes it work is its consistent art direction, which is not to be confused with the actual animation. The decision to go with a black and white color palette might seem simple on paper, but in execution, it’s very complicated and difficult to pull off. In comparison, Junji Ito Maniac had a short called “Mold” which features an all “black and white” color palette, however, it isn’t really black and white. At least to me, it looks as if it was colored first then either during production or post-production, they edited it by putting a black and white filter over it. It certainly stands out from the other shorts in that collection, but it just isn’t committed to making it as well defined, while Uzumaki did. From its inception, Uzumaki was to be in black and white to mimic the original manga. Everything pops in Uzumaki and makes it obvious that the team behind it knew how to translate each moving image into black and white. Nothing feels inserted in that color scheme; it’s all natural and it makes it stand out from anything that’s aired, not just for Toonami but anime for at least over fifty years of the medium’s existence.
I also find that Uzumaki is an effective horror show. Most horror anime, and even horror in general as a genre, can have issues in consistency in tone and pacing. Going back to Junji Ito Collection and Maniac, the worst stories revolve around Souichi, a kid who’s into the occult and likes to cause mischief for his friends and family both in and out of school. These stories are not scary and in fact I find Souichi’s antics quite annoying and ruin the pace of any episode where he’s the lead in it. I couldn’t say if it’s because the stories themselves are bad, the art in those shows ruin the appeal of them, or if it’s simply that they picked weak tales to adapt to begin with. Regardless, they aren’t good horror, even if they aren’t the worst thing ever, but if I’m supposed to find the pranks fun to watch or horrific, neither show never seems to set a consistent tone. Uzumaki, from episode one, is consistent. Right from the outset, something is wrong with the town of Kurozu-cho. Spirals are in the water, people in the town are starting to obsess over spirals, and it only spirals (I can make the joke once, okay?) out of control from there. To me, horror is all about setting a consistent tone and building up the scares, and that is something Uzumaki manages to do very well. While it isn’t perfect by any means, considering the staff was limited to just four episodes to tell the entire story of the manga’s nineteen chapters, things had to be condensed and reshuffled in order for them to make it work.
In fact, let’s talk about the pacing in Uzumaki because it is both the best and worst aspect of the series. With only four episodes to work with, they had to cram as much of the manga in as possible while trying to make a cohesive narrative in it. Because of that, the series can feel disjointed and not every story gets properly told. Previously, I brought up the lighthouse plotline and that is easily the one in the anime I can point to as awful. In the manga, there was a build up to the lighthouse, why Kirie’s little brother and friends were attracted to it, and how it relates to the spiral. It also sets up the events of what would happen later on. In the anime, it’s rushed with no build up and that weakens the scares that were present in the original manga panels, and that rushing causes an impact to episode three as well. It felt like a rush job from top to bottom and regardless of who is at fault for the production issues, the burden of the failings fall on everyone. Someone should’ve looked at the production and if it wasn’t already too deep into production, rewrite scenarios to make the episode flow better and either have a better buildup of the lighthouse or gut aspects of episode two to make it narratively fit better.
However, on the flipside, episode three is some of the most effective horror I have seen in a long time. That episode is mostly filled with the hospital arc of the manga, but also incorporates an early chapter with Shuichi’s mother that has been moved to here. I loved what they did because it recontextualizes Shuichi’s mom’s importance to the narrative and creates a better flow that something about the hospital is off. The entire hospital arc in the manga is deeply disturbing and it made me smile at how faithful they were in the anime while making smart changes that made the story flow better. Even the final episode, it feels balanced in its pacing, creating enough tension and buildup to the final moments of the entire show.
But of course, there’s the elephant in the room: the animation. I’ve touched on the production issues, but the animation is probably the heart of the problems with the show. Starting with episode one, the animation here is the peak of the series’ ability to show off really amazing looking scenes. Watching episode one, it feels like the audience was highly positive on it and felt that it is of high quality. The way each character moves from their body expressions to the mouth flaps, the animation delivers a level of detail I haven’t seen in an anime in quite some time. You can tell this was carefully crafted from beginning to end and I’m sure if they kept up the quality throughout the remaining episodes, I’m sure no one would have complained. However, that isn’t what we got at all. Earlier when I brought up episode two, I mentioned the inconsistent and downright awful animation. I also mentioned that to me, if the story is good, it can prevail because the strongest part is holding everything together. Unfortunately, that was not the case with episode two and while the subsequent episodes are more consistent in their animation, they still tend to feel rough around the edges. As an example, in episode three, where the crematorium catches on fire, it isn’t erupting in flames but rather we’re given a crude flame drawing with no shading that might give it intensity. The flame also doesn’t cover the building properly, which although somewhat hilarious, it’s also sad that they couldn’t nail that same consistency that was present in episode one. Despite this, the story and the scares are good enough that I am willing to look past them to some degree. While this isn’t always enough to save things, as I’ve mentioned with the other Ito adaptations and their poor pacing or lacking animation failing to make the scares rewarding, it works here.
What disappoints me most is that the ultimate curse that befell Uzumaki was its hellish development. To be clear, if it hadn’t taken five years to release, I don’t think the backlash would have been as intense as it has been. Normally, when these Toonami originals drop, they tend to be a fart in the wind, with little notice from larger outlets. In Uzumaki’s case, I saw major entertainment outlets that barely cover anime drag Jason DeMarco for the poor quality of episode two, which wasn’t helped by his quickly-deleted post on Bluesky fueling the discussion even more. People latched onto this show immediately and were quick to turn on it when things went sour, which is rather unfortunate, because Uzumaki is certainly not some god awful piece of shit.
I came into the premiere of this show with a hope that this would be the original to shut me up as I have been vocal for years that when it comes to anime originals produced by Adult Swim/Toonami, most if not all of them are just not good. That’s not to say that they are the worst thing ever, and it’s certainly not like Toonami is funding propaganda or anything, but they just lack quality control. I think it’s great that DeMarco does not want to go in and push back on the creative process. “Let them cook” as Gen Z would say, but I do think there needs to be a push and pull by the producers, especially if they’re funding these shows. FLCL Grunge is abhorrent, and while sure, the CGI isn’t awful, it’s a soulless sequel to an anime that didn’t need sequels to begin with. Even more recently with Rick and Morty The Anime, it’s clear to me that no one who watched the final project really believed in it. Sure, they promoted it well and had the show run with an English language dub on Adult Swim and a Japanese language with subtitles run on Toonami, but splitting that up seems more like a desperate attempt to make this show make sense in the end and it just didn’t. I don’t know how Rick and Morty The Anime fared in terms of viewership but it says a lot to me that even hardcore Rick and Morty fans aren’t coming to its defense. It’s a show no one liked or wanted to see, even with the success of those shorts, which were only successful because people were locked in their homes when they dropped! Not to bash Takashi Sano but what made the Rick and Morty anime terrible was its incoherent narrative that had no good pacing in it. Every episode was the same, regardless of what was in it, and they all felt the same from beginning to end. Completely, dry and devoid of anything interesting or creative. There needs to be someone coming in with more notes to tell them to rework ideas and if an idea isn’t working tell them to scrap it and move on. Granted I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes but going by an article that was detailing Toonami/Adult Swim’s history with originals by Polygon it seems William Street doesn’t interfere. I don’t know how you can continue not interfering with these productions after what went wrong with Uzumaki. Obviously, do not micromanage, there has to be some middle ground but letting creatives be creative without limitations can leave you with products like Rick and Morty The Anime.
Uzumaki, sadly did not do that, it only reinforced the things I’ve thought of previously and it sadly shows the shortcomings of everyone involved. Which is unfortunate, because despite its flaws, Uzumaki is a good show. I would go as far to say it’s a great show, and one that I can see Toonami and Adult Swim pulling out every October because it’s just a perfect Halloween show to marathon. I want Toonami, and by extension Jason DeMarco, to prove me wrong that they can deliver a high-quality original without fans or anyone like myself adding an asterisk to it as if to say, “yeah it’s good, but…”. However, they still have a ways to go before they can get to that point. I look forward to their upcoming slate of originals, but if Lazarus also receives that same negative reaction, I think they should just throw in the towel. As for Uzumaki, it’s a show that I will break out every year during the spooky season to get myself in the mood. It’s a very flawed show that, regardless of it taking years to release, I enjoyed my time with, flaws and all.
