Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we are at last concluding our journey through Hiroshi Nagahama’s ill-fated adaptation of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, a project which opened with great promise and then swiftly shifted to embodying the frustrating perils of anime’s new global funding paradigm. We all know the story at this point: after funding a perfectly paranoid first episode carrying on in the style of Nagahama’s brilliant Aku no Hana adaptation, this production’s American overseers apparently got cold feet, forcing the production team to hastily employ whatever limited animation tricks they could manage in order to fill out the ensuing episodes. What began as a labor of love became a testament to capitalism’s incapacity for it, a cold reminder that foreign investment in anime is not the same thing as genuine foreign interest in anime, beyond its thrifty capacity to furnish a streamer’s production slate.

So yeah, that’s all bad news. Nonetheless, it’s still an interesting release in its own right, both as a marvel of collapsing production trickery and a compromised yet still-compelling rendition of Junji Ito’s stories. And since I can’t track down precisely whoever decided Uzumaki was an acceptable casualty of corporate malfeasance, the least I can do is honor the wreckage, and celebrate the embers of Nagahama’s ambitions. Let’s get to it!

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we are returning to the ill-fortuned terrors of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, as we sift through the wreckage of this once-promising adaptation. After a first episode that saw Hiroshi Nagahama wielding his singular yet undeniably laborious Aku no Hana-adjacent aesthetic to marvelous dramatic effect, producer meddling and presumed merger-prompted impatience on the American side has left the production floundering, wielding every cost-saving measure in the book to ensure its profoundly limited animation crosses the finish line. We’ve seen single-frame imitations of movements, cutaways to avoid animating faces, and walk cycles with perhaps two frames to their name, a grim parody of the meticulous animation style employed in this production’s first episode.

And yet, the inherently compelling nature of the material remains, alongside the production’s excellent background art, soundtrack, and foley work. The thing about Junji Ito’s stories is that they straddle the thin line separating horror from farce even in their original form; hell, stories like Kirie’s brief hostile hair fiasco don’t really have any interpretation other than comedy, so divorced are they from anything approaching a relatable human anxiety. An aesthetically compromised adaptation makes for an oddly compelling rendition of Ito’s tonally discordant vignettes, and Uzumaki’s tales are certainly never boring. With expectations appropriately tempered, let us return to the spiral!

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I announce with some degree of trepidation that we are returning to Uzumaki, the recent adaptation of Junji Ito’s famed horror manga. Though the first episode of this adaptation was actually phenomenal, there were apparently some catastrophic production breakdowns in the course of this series’ oft-delayed genesis. As a result, this second episode no longer boasts direction by Hiroshi Nagahama, the horror maestro whose uncanny application of rotoscoped animation and fastidious attention to sound design detail made the first episode such a wonder.

The reasons for this breakdown are both obscure and predictable; I don’t have exact knowledge of who pulled the plug, but it seems obvious that someone on the American side of this production got cold feet regarding the time and labor required for Nagahama’s approach, and instead tossed the production to a director who is renowned for putting in slipshod, subpar work at presumably cheaper rates. This is of a piece with American producers’ general lack of respect for the work that goes into anime production, and with Adult Swim in particular’s conflation of nostalgia with artistic value. Shows like the FLCL sequels embody Henry Ford’s maxim of “if I asked the people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses” – it is up to great artists to show people what they could never have imagined wanting, and a philosophy born of “I want to recreate the exact conditions of when I first saw Cowboy Bebop at 1 AM on Adult Swim” will never produce such new ideas.

Thus we journey onward, into the consequences of high-level producers demanding swift, affordable results from a process whose fruits they could never measure or understand. With the spiral closing in around Uzumaki itself, we return to the field!

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re checking out a new production, as we explore the long-awaited adaptation of horror mangaka Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, or “Spiral.” The acclaimed manga centers on the town of Kurouzu-cho, where some sort of spiral-oriented curse is steadily infecting the townsfolk and the landscape around them. In classic Ito fashion, Uzumaki wavers between eerie body horror and high-concept farce, treading the uncertain line dividing horror from comedy, and ultimately building a profound sense of entrapment and dread across its spiral-centered vignettes.

Whether Ito’s work can be translated to effective animation is another question entirely, and one that has been afforded some worrying precedent through prior adaptations like Gyo and the recent Junji Ito Collection. Conveying horror through the inherently affected medium of animation is extremely difficult; horror generally demands a sense of vulnerability, and an audience’s awareness that they are watching lines drawn on a page tends to undercut any aspirations in that direction. It is additionally the inherent wobbling nature of Ito’s linework, as if he’s scratching with the charcoals of a ritual fire, that often affords his stories such profound emotive power. Stack all that with his work’s tendency to strain suspension of disbelief even in its original medium, and you’ve got a mammoth task facing any prospective adaptation.

Fortunately, director Hiroshi Nagahama is an absolute master of tone, and has already proven through both his Mushishi and Flowers of Evil adaptations that he is literally the best horror director working in animation. If anyone can manage it, Nagahama can, and I’m certainly eager to see him try. Let’s get to it!

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