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!