Horror anime, worth the wait

Uzumaki premieres Saturday, September 28th at 12:30 pm ET on Adult Swim. Both the Japanese and English dubs will be available to stream on Max the next day. The English-language encores will be broadcast every Thursday at 12:30 p.m. starting October 3rd.

Adult Swim's adaptation of Junji Ito's 1998 manga Uzumaki was worth the wait, which is probably a huge shock given other attempts to portray it that way Putting stories in motion. Although there is a winding path to liberation and emerging in a world that means a lot more warped than at the start of productionThe anime shows a clear understanding of what makes its source material work while making necessary, perhaps hasty, changes for the pace of television. Luckily, it still retains most of its twisted spirit.

Uzumaki is widely regarded as the mangaka's most important work (although for me it is the spooky short story “The Enigma of Amigara Fault”), a unique read that is cruel and tense, yet balanced with some camp silliness. It's a work that includes disgusting deformations of bodies and, inexplicably, a chapter about how sometimes your new haircut can be a little too sexy. The animated series inspired by it revolves around two teenagers who begin to notice strange happenings in their hometown of Kurouzu-cho. Shuichi Saito is particularly concerned about his father's growing obsession with IUDs. All the lines swirling around himself, wherever they are, attract his utmost concentration and attention. The manga tackles each new strange discovery in the city one at a time, while the Adult Swim version threads some of the storylines from all over in this first episode, adapting some of the early chapters almost entirely and introducing plot points from further down the timeline. While none of the material feels out of place, this episode certainly tries to do too much at once. In just 22 minutes there are four separate storylines, three of which could probably make great episodes if given time, and could probably have been found more breathing room later. (It can also be argued that changing the chronology of some events creates a slight discrepancy in the plot, but that's up to the video essayists.)

If you're only passively familiar with the manga, you may be familiar with some of its most iconic images – and you'll see many of them in this 20-minute premiere, given loving attention and additional, horrifying, gory details from the extra set. One of them made me physically cringe – that's a positive. Adult Swim pulls no punches with its depiction of graphic damage here, but its Uzumaki is also playfully silly. Scenes like a slow-moving boy trying to return a volleyball might seem odd together, but they're a reprieve in an intense highlight reel of some of Ito's strangest imagery.

Animation is at its best when it adds flair to images that are already terrible on the page. There's a moment where a character's tongue becomes unnaturally large and it's so cool to see it moving. In some shots, the characters move as if they were rotoscoped, and that eerie feeling of being real but not real worked well to keep me on edge in many of the episode's less dramatic scenes.

Uzumaki Premiere Gallery