📖 Synopsis

Uzumaki follows high-school student Kirie Goshima, her boyfriend Shuichi Saito, and the citizens of Kurouzu-cho, a small Japanese town engulfed by supernatural events involving spirals. As the curse spreads, people become obsessed with or paranoid about spiral patterns, and the town descends into grotesque body horror, environmental distortion, and total psychological collapse.

The spiral curse twists bodies into monsters, turns pregnant women into mosquito-like predators, raises the dead, mutates citizens into snails, and transforms the town itself through whirlwinds, whirlpools, spiral smoke, warped vegetation, and a burning lighthouse. Eventually, time, space, architecture, and the townspeople themselves become part of one endless spiral cycle.

🖤 My Review

I would have to say that I am a very big Junji Ito fan. From Tomie to The Whispering Woman to so many other stories of the macabre, I went into this adaptation really wanting it to succeed. I actually think the choice to make it a 4 episode anime was good in theory because the story is short enough to work in a tighter format, and because it is so short I felt like they had enough time to make the animation more consistent and way more detailed.

The first episode was very crisp. The animation looked sharp, the visuals were stylish, and a lot of those scenes were clearly the ones used to sell the anime in the trailers. That first impression really made it feel like this was finally going to be one of the Junji Ito adaptations that got it right.

At the same time, the fact that Max was involved and that it ended up airing through Adult Swim made the final result even more disappointing. Sadly this is also not surprising, because Junji Ito is no stranger to getting poorly animated adaptations. A lot of his work has been turned into something that feels way more like a glitchy slideshow than a fully realized horror anime.

I am very satisfied with certain episodes and scenes, especially Shuichi’s father and the spiral obsession, the smoke in the sky, and the scar chapter for Azami. But the most disappointing part is when the shift happens. After Azami’s episode it goes downhill, and that says a lot when the whole anime is only four episodes long.

Overall, it is not awful because at least we got animation for such a great book and there are still moments that genuinely hit. But it did fall short compared to the level of care and polish other anime get from other companies. Like Ninja Kamui, Uzumaki ended up feeling like another example of Max trying to make money off anime without really succeeding at retaining anime fans. If anything, projects like these make people more skeptical about future anime from them.