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The animated adaptation of perhaps one of legendary horror mangaka Junji Ito’s most beloved collections of macabre tales, Uzamaki finally arrived on Adult Swim this month. Uzumaki was initially going to release in 2020, yet production delays plagued this adaptation until finally a completed version met fans the end of September. The first episode gloriously arrived and here are my first impressions via a short review!

Spoilers Big and Small, Up Ahead!

The Vibes

The audience tuning in to watch Uzumaki will be quickly introduced to a place that is not quite right. The small town of Kurouzu-cho is home to both Shuichi Saito and Kirie Goshima who are students and children of families soon affected by the madness overtaking the town. The town has been…contaminated by a spiral–and an eerie feeling has been picked up by Shuichi, and he attempts to explain the wrongness of the place. Kirie, his girlfriend, doesn’t take him seriously when he says “Let’s leave this town together”, and as time passes she begins to understand the place is doomed.

In just a few minutes of this first episode of Uzumaki , the audience is awash in the ideal that this place ain’t right as spirals can be seen in a stream where students are walking, in the sky high in the sky and even with a well-timed burst of wind that interrupts a conversation. The tension is further amplified with the deterioration of a loved one and the introduction of an outsider with a dark agenda. The longer and longer I watched, the more I saw a place stuck in the middle of an outbreak of mania all dedicated to a spiral–and a town held prisoner to it.

Spiraling Out

The black and white color scheme for this animated adaptation here in Uzumaki adds to the overall, eerie tone of the project, for sure. (Flying Lotus, a long-time Adult Swim music collaborator, suggested it as mentioned here!) I love that this idea made it to the final version of what we finally were able to see as it brings us closer to the original manga pages where the story first was born. This visually aesthetic choice makes some of the manga’s most macabre scenes from the first half of Ito’s original work pop on screen brilliantly, turning up the drama and impact. This first episode of Uzamaki shows a myriad of emotions at play: madness, cruelty, disgust, pride, fear, infatuation, desire, and heartbreak.

Even big reveals that I once saw on the page on the manga by Junji Ito, now animated, still shook me and left me flinching away from the screen. I really enjoyed the addition of Colin Stetson to the creative team and his original score for the series. “I absolutely adored my time making this music and inhabiting the strange, gorgeous, horrifying, and spectacular spiral world that Ito-Sensei created” was a statement that he gave in an Instagram post earlier this summer.

Stetson, a composer perhaps best known to American audiences for his work on 2018’s Hereditary, adds a musical score that compliments the darkness and madness that fits Uzamaki like a glove. I especially felt that the music for the sequence where Kirire meets Shuichi’s father was a delightfully frightening sequence where the music played up the terror so well. The way it continued afterwards after she was gone to Shuichi’s scary encounter really connected the two teens in their moments of terror.

Last Thoughts on Episode One:

Uzamaki has finally arrived, and the first episode’s outing earns its stripes by way of it being a creepy, unsettling, and picturesque way that only a Ito manga can be. With a haunting original score, a black and white animation color scheme and voice acting talent not afraid to scream and sound off in distress, it was perfect to watch on a lone Sunday evening. The long-awaited adaptation of one of legendary horror mangaka Junji Ito’s most beloved works, means the second episode has a lot to live up to for older fans and newer fans alike. Hopefully, the series estimated to be four episodes manages to pull off the dire dread that the original work pulls off so effortlessly.

Uzumaki: The Animated Series premiered September 28 on Adult Swim, next day on Max. Based on the original graphic novel “UZUMAKI” by Junji ITO published by Shogakukan Inc. © Junji ITO , Shogakukan / Production I.G.,LLC

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The post ‘Uzumaki’ Anime Sets Out as an Unsettling and Darkly Picturesque Adaptation appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.