Uzumaki

I'm a fan of this kind of horror setup-the slow, creeping dread and the bizarre, nightmarish world and that's probably what kept me hooked for as long as it did. But the lackluster execution in later episodes really started to take away from the experience.

In terms of the art style, the first episode showed so much promise. The use of rotoscoping, while unusual for anime, fit the eerie, unsettling nature of Junji Ito's story. It added a layer of surrealism that felt appropriate for the twisted world of Uzumaki. But after that, the art became more of a distraction than an enhancement. The movements felt stiff and unnatural, and the once eerie tone of the show quickly faded into frustration. It's disappointing because the story deserves better, and the art should have elevated the horror instead of dragging it down.

In the end, this adaptation leaves much to be desired. If you're truly interested in experiencing the twisted world of Uzumaki, you're better off sticking with the manga. At least there, the horror comes through as intended.

Uzumaki was the first manga I've read and upon hearing it was getting an anime adaptation back in 2019 I was excited. Especially after seing the first teaser displaying the gorgeous animation. Five years and three delays later I was kinda let down by episode 1. The pacing was waaay to fast for me to connect with the characters and for any horror to be felt. The best horror works; be it movies, games or novels takes their time and simmer up to a boil slowly when this was speeding down a highway in 200km/h covering like 3-4 chapters of the original manga in roughly 20 minutes. However the music by Colin Stetson and the previously mentioned animation work was amazing. That was when I heard that the anime only would be 4 episodes long... a bit bummed out about that I started watching episode 2. That's when I realized that Uzumaki (the anime) is a total and utter failure. Apparently a new animation studio were chosen for this episode and now the animation looks laughably cheap and bad. Like vomit in a pile of manure. And full of animation errors. I am absolutely gutted by this. One of the reasons for delaying the anime three times were, and I quote: "... we don't want to compromise its quality by delivering a mediocre final product." Oh boy, that ship has sailed. This is not a mediocre product, this is just straight up bad. Really bad. I will probably still watch episode 3 and 4, but not because I have any faith that it will be getting any better after this, but because I want to see how far down the spiral of embarrassment this actually goes.

The anime's biggest flaw is pacing, it lacks coherence, it's like the purpose of this show is just to animate Ito's scenes from the manga like a kill count compilation rather than telling the story with more clarity, the worse of all is that those scenes only went better on ep1, the rest were mostly "ok" or "meh...". To give more clarity about the absurdity the manga has 19 CHAPTERS it was shortened to 4 EPISODES each with 20 min and ep4 having 30 min.

My expectations on the anime were high, it took 6 years to develop this thing, just to have the best official adaptation of Junji Ito only in the first Episode. Indeed a curse on Adult Swim animes, starts great and then falls flat at the end just like Ninja Kamui or Housing Complex C (which was flat all the way). I didn't watched the other shows like R&M anime or FLCL reboot but as I have seen community review are just not nice with these shows.

Continue to make your west shows Adult Swim, stay away of Japan.

But I am giving it a 5 because for one thing this anime served purpose was to introduce people into Junji Ito's work. Read the original Uzumaki manga for yall that is reading this and perhaps read his other entries as well.

Until then we wait for a Junji Ito adaptation to fall in good hands...

If episode 2-4 were the same quality of the first episode I'd be willing to rate this an 8 or 9 but the quality fell off a cliff after the first episode. And the pacing ruins any tension the show is trying to build. So it just goes from wacky thing to wacky thing.

This should have been a non-traditional run length with stories that needed to be longer would be longer episodes and stories that were more side stories wouldn't feel the need to maintain a full episode length. But at least then the story would be contained.

Instead this anime adaptation feels like it happens in a matter of days instead of a longer period. It's just a shame because this manga of all of Junji Ito's works deserved a faithful adaptation.

Most of the good reviews are of the 1st ep. Which by itself, wasn't that good considering the pretty bad pacing, the only thing that saved it was the music and animation. The second ep is out now and oh boy... the pacing... is absolutely terrible, even worse than the 1st, they skip chapters like I skip my homework. They just put creepy scene after creepy scene after creepy scene witouth much care of how they each play with each other, its almost like they're just trying to meet the quota or notebook checking what creepy scenes they got to include, instead of trying to make any kind of buildup to make them actually work. The animation took a real nosedive too, and this is all on ep2... (to note that the anime has 4 eps only and was postponed like 3 times or something...) how is this even possible, did they waste all their budget on ep 1?

I will be watching the final 2 eps, but honestly, I just really hope that I'm wrong and they didn't waste all their budget on ep 1 animation.......... damn, I'm really disappointed.