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DIRECTED BY: Hiroshi Nagahama, Yûji Moriyama

FEATURING: Uki Satake, Shin’ichirô Miki; Abby Trott, Robbie Daymond (English dub)

PLOT: Residents of a small Japanese town are increasingly haunted by spirals.

COMMENTS: Most horror story monsters are inspired by symbols of death, disease, and predation, not unthreatening geometric shapes like the humble spiral. Leave it to eerie manga star Junjo Ito to choose the spiral as his avatar of evil. Uzumaki (which had previously been adapted as a live-action feature) plumbs every possible devious iteration of the humble coil; it shows up in the story as whirlwinds, whirlpools, DNA, snail’s shells, hair curls, staircases, mosquito swarms, corkscrews, springs, and the twisted, intertwined bodies of snakes (and people). Watch with disquietude as everyday objects in the town gradually get twisted as the story spirals towards its grim conclusion.

The bizarre antagonist is not the only weird element here. The originally-serialized story lurches forward as a series of vignettes, with a threatening new spiral form dominating each mini-arc. In between episodes, normality resets. After the first girl’s head dissolves into a spiral, we would think the two high school protagonists would flee town; instead, the incident is never mentioned again. After the first kid turns into a human-snail hybrid, you would think the town would panic; instead, they accept it as the new normal, building a pen for the newly-minted escargot boy to live in. The commonsense idea of fleeing the town doesn’t even arise until the second episode, when one pair of aspiring refugees are frustrated in their attempt—but our main characters never even attempt to leave until the final episode, when the narrative finally proffers an explanation for their inability to escape. A particularly intense, vampire-adjacent incident dominates the third episode, but again, after a jarring edit, this horror is entirely forgotten. The characters’ incapacity—and their resigned unwillingness—to escape their situation lends the story an especially irrational, nightmarish quality. In fact, Uzuamki‘s entire structure, oscillating between grotesque visions and uneasy pseudo-normality, suggests madness; perhaps our main characters are actually trapped inside their own obsessive delusions, imagining spirals everywhere.

The art style is done entirely in black and white and imitates the intricate linework of Ito’s original drawings, sometimes recreating particularly bizarre panels. When animated, the absurdity of some of Ito’s visions—a dramatically curling tongue, a pair of eyeballs rotating independently—can be as weirdly comic as they are frightening. But the artwork is almost always strange and affecting, no matter the overall emotional effect. Much was made in anime fandom of the fact that the animation quality declines as the series progresses (probably due to budgetary mismanagement). By the final episode, the directors and producers aren’t even credited. I think that this complaint is mostly overstated, at least for the average viewer. I noted the decline in the cartoon’s fluidity and detail with each new episode, but it wasn’t as drastic as I feared; if I hadn’t been forewarned, I’m not sure how much I would have noticed. Perhaps I benefited from having my expectations lowered; perhaps you will, too. Although Uzumaki hobbles a bit on the way to the finish line, it eventually crosses it. It’s not the wall-to-wall masterpiece the first episode promised, but I wouldn’t say it exactly circles the drain, either.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this work is very much playing in the realm of weird fiction, a sub-genre focused on the unknown and inexplicable… macabre, strange, and utterly unique, even if some of its characters feel a bit thin at times.”–Elijah Gonzalez, Paste (episode 1)

Uzumaki (Limited Edition Blu-ray Steelbook)

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