Hello and welcome to Project Nitsuj. When it comes to modern day horror in Japan no one is more revered and respected as Junji Ito. Drawing and discovering fear at a young age, Ito’s horror stories center around body and cosmic horror, and are legit scary and disturbing. One of the great things about his manga is not only how good the stories are but just how detailed his artwork is. It’s actually normal for him to spend hours if not days working on one panel to get the details just right. It’s a long process but the results speak for themselves as his artwork is up there with some of the best mangakas. Because of how popular his work is, it only made sense to adapt it into animes and that’s what they did throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s. Sadly, these animes are bad as none of them were able to capture the details of Ito’s artwork. As a result, the horror doesn’t hit as well as it should and you can add the latest attempt, Uzumaki, to the list. One of Ito’s best works. Uzumaki tells the story of a town literally spiraling out of control and its residents powerless to stop it. The manga originally came out in 1998-1999 gaining a following over the years and even having a live action adaptation as well as an anime. In 2019 an anime adaptation was announced being produced by Production I.G (Ghost in the Shell, Kuroko’s Basketball and Joker Game) and Adult Swim. The previews for it looked great as it was done in black and white and felt like the manga was coming to life. In 2024, the anime made it’s debut on Adult Swim and while the first episode went over great, things quickly went south for the rest of the episodes. Let’s navigate this spiral of madness and take a look at Uzumaki.
The anime begins in a small town call Kurouzu (where the sky is looking very colorless today. They didn’t have budget for color). We meet a girl named Kirie walking home with her boyfriend Shuichi who says they should leave this town because it’s becoming strange. Apparently, the town has been invaded by spirals making things strange. The plants have spiral forms, the streams of waters are creating mini-whirlpools, and even Shuichi’s dad has become obsessed with spirals spending all day looking at them and collecting anything that has them (he’s a freak). Kirie plays this off as nothing serious but when she sees his dad talking to her dad she starts to have second thoughts (no man should ever speak about spirals that passionately). The next day we meet her friend Azami a beautiful girl who all the boys have a crush on except for Shuichi who says she’s a spiral. This makes her become obsessed with him (typical girl. When a guy is interested in you, you ignore them. But when they ignore you all of a sudden you want their babies). Shuichi’s dad eventually dies after distorting his body into the shape of spiral (that idea alone is terrifying) breaking every bone in his body. Things only get more disturbing at the funeral. As they burn his ashes (you didn’t bury him in a spiral shape coffin? I’m sure that’s what he would have wanted) the smoke from it creates a spiral in the sky and his face appears mentally breaking his wife who starts to freak out whenever she sees spirals. She even cut off her own hair as well as toeprints and fingerprints (oh God). We then get the craziest moment of the episode near the end. A spiral begins to form on Azami’s head. At first, it doesn’t seem all that scary but it begins to expand until eventually it consumes her whole face and becomes a blackhole consuming her whole body and killing her (scene here: https://youtu.be/ee8Du8FavYQ?si=6ZezlxdTXIDtjpPI. Okay, here’s a complete recap so far. Guy distorts his body into the shape of a spiral and appears in the sky at his funeral. His wife has a mental breakdown and cuts off her fingerprints and toeprints. Finally, a girl has a spiral grow on her forehead and said spiral absorbs her body completely like a mini-blackhole. It’s only the first episode and I’m already scared shitless).
So after all the crazy shit that went down in episode 1 you’d think Kirie and Shuichi would leave the town, but nope, they continue on with their lives (clearly the spirals have taken you over. Because I would be gone. Wouldn’t even look back. Fuck this town and its spirals). This episode isn’t as scary as the first episode and kind of boring. In Kirie’s class a student named Katayama arrives late. He’s a strange student as he’s very slow and only seems to come to class when it’s raining (but he still gets straight A’s on his tests). To make things stranger he has this swelling happening on his back which you guessed it, looks like a spiral (what? Were you expecting a rectangle?). Naturally, the class is disturbed by this and says it looks like a snail’s shell and gets even more disturbing the next time they see him as he became a snail and crawls along the school building (scene here: https://youtu.be/ZpLSwsm3idc?si=YWRbWPnQLGO28SQj). The school manages to catch him and lock him in a cage like some kind of pet (no, shoot him!). Another student turns into a snail and mates with Katayama where they lay eggs that get destroyed by the teacher in order not to panic the whole town (I told you to shoot him). The teacher also gets turned into a snail and everyone is okay with this (this town really has gone crazy). In story B, Kirie’s hair grows out of control, turning into spirals and gaining everyone’s attention. A jealous student wanting the attention for herself also has her hair grow out of control and duels Kirie (hair battle!). Shuichi manages to save Kirie by cutting her hair while the other girl gets tangled up in a telephone pole and supposedly dies (scene here: https://youtu.be/8NiEEQzUgpc?si=mVdtEhgTxzZYG4ti). Speaking of death, one of Kirie’s classmates who has a crush on her and knows she has a boyfriend tries to prove his love by stopping a car. He fails, gets run over, and dies (scene here: https://youtu.be/zRNquP2pHPI?si=J0H8G15cwleyO4rC, he deserved it for acting stupid). In story C we have a boy and a girl caught in the middle of their feuding families. The boy and girl like each other and decide to run away together only to get cornered by their dads on the beach. In order to be together forever, they coil around each other like snakes mating and then swim away never to be seen again (okay, we need to burn this town down). In the final story the old lighthouse becomes operational again out of nowhere and some people can’t stop walking in a spiral pattern. When Kirie’s brother, Mitsuo, and his friends enter the lighthouse, Kirie goes after them where she comes across a few dead bodies that were burnt to a crisp. She makes it to the top only to see a disfigured searchlight and quickly pieces together that it was the lens that burnt those people alive whenever the sun went down. Kirie and the boys quickly run down the stairs to escape being burned to death with one of the boys getting caught in the light and Kirie and her other also getting caught to end the episode on a cliffhanger.
At the start of episode 3 we see that Kirie was admitted to the hospital to treat her burns (well apparently they did a good job because I don’t see a single burnt mark on her body at all. Japan’s healthcare system is amazing). While there, she shares a room with her cousin, Keiko, who was bitten by multiple mosquitos. It’s not just her, multiple women who were pregnant were also bitten pretty badly by the mosquitos (this is why we have repellent people). The next morning, the hospital discovers 3 dead male patients who were killed in their sleep and nobody knows how it happened or who did it. The next night, Kirie discovers that it was the pregnant female patients who killed the men. They’ve been breaking into their rooms and using manual hand drills to drain and suck their blood. Once Kirie is discovered, the women go on a rampage and start attacking everyone (scene here: https://youtu.be/a2tcn8mx3Nc?si=-Qae3j3wVdmpK-3T), but Kirie manages to scare them off with bug spray (I think a shotgun would have worked better). Kirie tells everyone what happened last night but nobody believes her (does the hospital not have cameras in this backwater town?) and they eventually all give birth to talking babies (and nobody bats an eye at this, they just accept it. There’s no hope for this town). They all want to go back into the womb and in an act of defiance they regenerate their placenta from their umbilical cords, which take the form of mushrooms loaded with blood (oh my God this episode has got to be the most twisted. I am generally disturbed). Keiko’s baby was no different as the now deranged doctor sewn the baby back into the womb and tried to feed Kirie to a now insane Keiko. Kirie manages to escape and Keiko instead drains the doctor of his blood. After leaving the hospital (leave the damn town), Kirie returns home where we see her dad has started to develop his own obsession with spirals and puts them in all of his pottery. Later on, a typhoon hits the town and keeps calling out to Kirie which she ignores (she’s had enough strangeness for one day, thank you very much). Shuichi shows up and says the typhoon has fallen in love with her (https://youtu.be/2-WPlvZguZ4?si=nOAa8iOxTWzLDpyy) and tells her they need to leave the house before it destroys her family. So they run through the streets and into the sewers only for the typhoon to find them, suck them up, and drop them off by the town’s pond before shortly dispersing. Since their house got assumably destroyed by the typhoon, the family holds up in an old rowhouse (where more insanity occurs). Wakabayashi, a friend of the family visits to inform them that their neighbors are an old lady and boy who suffers from malady. A few days later, the boy dies with strange spikes all over his body (I’ll give you one guess what they’re shaped like). Wakabayashi develops an obsession with Kirie and spies on her from another room where the spiral shaped spikes start to appear on him as well. They completely cover his body and he tries to attack Kirie but is killed by flying debris from a second typhoon.
In the final episode a news team attempts to reach the town after it was reported that it got hit by four more typhoons (holy crap that town is dead). Their car gets hit by a whirlwind which kills everyone except the reporter, Chie, who has to go on foot. She reaches the town which has completely been destroyed by the typhoons and the only thing remaining is the pond which is now swirling around like a spiral. Chie meets Kirie and Mitsuo who explain the slightest sounds or motions create dangerous whirlwinds and have to move slowly to avoid making them. The only problem is that this has caused people to turn into giant snails who are kidnapped by gangs and eaten. They bring Chie back to the rowhouse which has become packed with other citizens who kick Kirie, her family, and Shuichi (who is long gone) out for bringing back a new person. Chie says they have to escape but that’s impossible. Multiple groups tried to escape as well only to get dragged back into town and escape at sea results in whirlpools appearing and sucking people in (yeah, I hate to say it but it might be time to drop a nuke on this place). In a fight with a gang, Kirie’s dad gets blown away by a whirlwind and her mom gets injured. Despite their best efforts, Kirie and Shuichi weren’t able to find him in the following days. They find other refugees looking for shelter and come across another rowhouse on the outskirts which is so full that the people inside became entangled with each other to form one giant knot. Once Kirie returns to Mitsuo and her mom, she finds out that her mom got swept up by a whirlwind and Mitsuo is starting to turn into a snail (this is a game over scenario. You are all going to die). They try to escape through the mountains with other refugees who slowly go crazy and want to eat Mitsuo. When Mitsuo finally becomes a snail, Kirie helps him escape and continues to go through the mountains with Shuichi and Chie (scene here: https://youtu.be/-aHXWeL21BE?si=4FeCF32Wyfzx8gbn). Somehow, the trio make it back to the town where they find out years have gone by since they left for the mountains (even time is spirally out of control) and the whole town has now become one big rowhouse in the shape of a spiral that leads to the pond. On their way to the pond, Chie gets pulled into the entangled knot and once Kirie and Shuichi reach the pond everyone disappears and find that the pond is all dried up. They find a staircase and go downward where they both fall. Once Kirie reaches the bottom, she finds a temple made of spirals surrounded by the tangled remains of everyone (honestly, I was expecting them to be snails bowing at the temple. Man, this anime has messed me up. Thank God it’s almost over). She finds Shuichi who reveals that this temple is the cause of everything that happened in their town (no shit, look at this thing. How’d they even make this in the first place?). Shuichi says the curse happens once every century and believes it should be ending soon but the two just don’t have the strength to keep fighting off the curse (I think Kirie stopped fighting it after episode 2). Thus their bodies twist into one and a giant drill rises and closes the stairwell thus ending the curse and anime (https://youtu.be/Va5_rn3vG3A?si=ZHVPOuXRSIslYbpC). After the credits, we find out that a new town was built over the remains of their old town and life goes on, but the curse of the spirals remains (and the cycle continues with a new generation).
Final Thoughts
So that was Uzumaki and I’ll say this, out of Ito’s animes, this is the one that comes the closest to representing his work. Which is still bad, because the anime has a few pacing and animation issues. The animation for the first episode was spectacular. I do like the black and white style. It makes it feel like the manga has come to life or like I’m watching some old school horror movie. However, there’s a significant drop in the animation after the first episode which is a shame because this series deserves better. This series was in production for 5 years and you’re telling me you couldn’t get these 4 episodes the proper attention in that time frame? Now according to interviews, they lost a year of production due to covid and there was some behind the scenes issues, but that still doesn’t add up. There shouldn’t be this many animation issues, especially for a 4-episode series. The pacing is also an issue as it starts to jump from one horror scenario to the next particularly in episodes 3-4. Episode one had good pacing and episode two was decent, but you really start to see the issues in episodes 3-4. It never allows us to process the horrors of what we just witnessed and just jumps right into the next one due to time constraints. If there were more episodes like 8 or 10 this issue would have easily been fixed. Speaking of horrors, they are legitimately scary and unsettling. While not all of them are a hit, a majority of them are scary and make you feel uncomfortable. The biggest issues I have with this series is that they never explain what this curse is, how it started, and why it’s happening now? While this is a common occurrence in Ito’s work I wish he would have added a little backstory into the spirals and why it’s restricted to just this one town and hasn’t consumed the world yet.
Final Score
My final score for Uzumaki is 5/10. I really wanted to give this series a higher score. Horror isn’t really my thing, but I respect the work of Junji Ito a lot and wanted this series to show the world just how good he is, but it still falls short of expectations. I guess his work is too much for anime to handle. If you want to see the full story, definitely pick up the manga. The artwork is great and you’ll be scared reading it. One thing is for sure, I’m never gonna look at spirals the same way ever again. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time on Project Nitsuj as Aniween concludes. I think you know what’s coming next week.
*Nitsuj picks up a chainsaw and begins to laugh maniacally*
