Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we are at last concluding our journey through Hiroshi Nagahama’s ill-fated adaptation of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, a project which opened with great promise and then swiftly shifted to embodying the frustrating perils of anime’s new global funding paradigm. We all know the story at this point: after funding a perfectly paranoid first episode carrying on in the style of Nagahama’s brilliant Aku no Hana adaptation, this production’s American overseers apparently got cold feet, forcing the production team to hastily employ whatever limited animation tricks they could manage in order to fill out the ensuing episodes. What began as a labor of love became a testament to capitalism’s incapacity for it, a cold reminder that foreign investment in anime is not the same thing as genuine foreign interest in anime, beyond its thrifty capacity to furnish a streamer’s production slate.
So yeah, that’s all bad news. Nonetheless, it’s still an interesting release in its own right, both as a marvel of collapsing production trickery and a compromised yet still-compelling rendition of Junji Ito’s stories. And since I can’t track down precisely whoever decided Uzumaki was an acceptable casualty of corporate malfeasance, the least I can do is honor the wreckage, and celebrate the embers of Nagahama’s ambitions. Let’s get to it!
Episode 4
We open on a shot of a van going through a long tunnel, its headlights barely illuminating a tenth of the screen. An effective composition, creating an inherent sense of the surrounding darkness pressing down on this lonely, isolated vehicle, with the greyscale tone only increasing the sense of entrapment. As I said, the production team is still doing everything they can with the resources at their disposal
The occupiers of the vehicle reflect on the sequence of typhoons that struck Kurouzu-cho, building up our anticipation for the reveal of the small town’s fate
A twister immediately swoops them up and drops them down, killing several of the van’s occupants. The lack of color does some work to mitigate the awkwardly simplified CG design of this twister
Some fine overall compositions here, though we’re once again relegated to those “walk cycles” that involve just raising and lowering the character art relative to the background
The van’s sole survivor wanders into town, discovering a swirling vortex at its center. Moments like this emphasize the intelligence of choosing to adapt the manga in black and white; there are many horrors that require a certain degree of obscurity to maintain their impact, a demand that audiences fill in the gaps of their design with their own fears. Just as a vaguely described monster in a novel can lose its ominous aura when realized as a concrete creature in adaptation, so can many ambiguously ominous visual concepts lose their surreal menace in the clarity of color. Just watch a film like Night of the Hunter, or the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or the original Nosferatu, and consider whether their horrors would be enhanced or reduced with the addition of color
This of course isn’t solely true for horror, either. Black and white cinema possesses a dramatic vocabulary all its own, much of which is lost in the transition to color
Apparently the town is now menaced by the “Butterfly Gang,” who harness tornadoes to attack the town’s remaining structures. As always, Ito’s work is as much comedy as it is horror
Kirie and her brother Mitsuo emerge from the wreckage, urging our new arrival to hide. Her name is Chie Murayama
The walk cycles still aren’t great, but at least their arms are moving now. It does seem like they settled on a more reasonable visual compromise after the disastrous second episode
The survivors are forced to whisper, as any dramatic motion or sound might set off more spirals
Shuichi’s paranoia gets them kicked out of the safehouse. The inhabitants of this town are petty, selfish, and tribalistic – beyond the horror of the spirals, Uzumaki also takes no prisoners in its assessment of insular, rural Japanese towns. A theme I’ve certainly seen articulated elsewhere, from Shiki through The Summer Hikaru Died
Our potter is still obsessed with perfecting the art of the spiral, and demands clay from the eternally spinning Dragonfly Pond. Gonna have to do something about that guy
They discover the Butterfly Gang has been roasting and eating the snail people. Some wonderfully awful imagery here, juxtaposing the skulls still visible in the roasted snails with the gaunt, skeletal faces of these quasi-cannibals
“We’re the Dragonfly Gang now. We’re carnivores.” As in Shiki, our pretense of civility is a thin veneer concealing brutal, animalistic urges. Once the social order breaks down, a monstrous new philosophy is swift to replace it
“The female prey are fleeing at 12 o’clock!” “Combine and pursue!” Given the state of the world today, this vision of apocalyptic scavengers clinging to such childish “boy soldier” methods of defining themselves seems perfectly accurate. They will play-act their way to murder, rape, and cannibalism, exulting in the realization of their juvenile, antisocial fantasies
These tornadoes sadly only emphasize the lack of character animation. Hard to imagine someone would be maintaining a perfectly still pose while being spun around in a tornado
“Escape is impossible. Go in any direction, and you’ll end up where you started.” Like the spiral itself. The realm where any attempted exit leads you back to the start is always a fertile horror concept, perhaps because it so accurately resembles the mind-betraying horror of dream logic
The tunnels twist and weave until they’re impassable, while escaping by boat only gets you swallowed by a whirlpool
Apparently the old wooden row houses have survived in spite of the destruction of more modern concrete structures. Presumably they have some terrible connection to the curse
They start checking each other’s backs for snail markings. The fundamental senselessness of these transformations is a nice source of horror; unlike the initial transformation, there’s no indication that anyone in particular “earned” these marks of doom. I always appreciate horror sequences where some characters believe they’ve righted a wrong or completed a ritual and thus “earned” safety from their supernatural tormentor, only to learn they never had any control over their fate in the first place
As expected, those hiding in the row houses have become entangled, their bodies fusing as more and more survivors shoved their way inside
And they’re actually collecting lumber to extend the row houses, presumably in service of turning the entire town into a spiral
One saving grace of this adaptation is that much of the original impact of Ito’s work comes in the form of single, static image punchlines, something the animation can at least attempt to recreate directly. An ideal adaptation would obviously seek to articulate the horror of seeing these misshapen bodies in motion, but we’re doing what we can here
A caravan of rescue ships is then swallowed by the swirling sea. As always for Nagahama productions, the sound design is quite effective here – the wail of these ships’ horns muddled by the swirling wind sound like the panicked roars of dying animals
Eventually the survivors are also forced to survive on snail meat, as their community literally devours itself
Love the awful noise of these warped emergency sirens as well. Makes sense that the sound used to alert someone to an oncoming disaster or bombing run would itself become a source of horror, repurposed for use in something like this or Silent Hill
The background art of this demented spiral forest is quite compelling in its own right, coming across like a malevolent riff on the land of Oz
Wonderfully grotesque scene as Kirie urges snail-Mitsuo to escape down a cliff, rather than be consumed by their companions. I appreciate Ito’s lack of restraint in detailing the total breakdown of everything that connects these spiral-bound unfortunates to their humanity
By the time they return to Kurouzu-cho, the row house spiral is complete
Shuichi proposes that the town’s original shape was a spiral, and that the row houses have only decayed since, only to be rebuilt. A proposal with dashes of ritual and cosmic horror, suggesting a terrible logic to this land, a history that we have foolishly forgotten
The spiral now twists time as well, demonstrated as they come across fellow survivor Mr. Tanizaki, who apparently survived for years while they wandered in the woods. With every step, the nightmare becomes more all-consuming
“Why would the people back then have built something like this?” “It’s possible this has happened over and over again since ancient times.” Another fine source of horror – the contrast of a brief human life against the weight of history, against all that might be “natural” to this world, but simply moving at such a slow pace of repetition that our own brief awareness of the world is caught by surprise. Like if a mountain village that’s survived placidly for ten generations suddenly discovers its mountain is a volcano
It’s basically a variation on the same fear evoked by cosmic horror – that sense that we are tiny specks in a vast, uncaring universe, except transposed across time instead of space
Chie is lost in the last sealing of the spiral, which seems to take all of the town’s misshapen inhabitants with it
At the spiral’s core, they find a stairwell curving down beneath what once was Dragonfly Pond. The ritual core that time forgot
After Shuichi is dragged off the steps, Kirie also falls into the abyss, awaking at the foot of a great spiral temple. Yeah, we’re basically concluding on the full At the Mountains of Madness experience here
“It’s almost like they’re merging with the ruins.” We are simply bricks and mortar to beings of this scale, our fickle consciousness irrelevant to their greater aims. The fear that the beings which define our world don’t either love or hate us, but exist at a level where they are oblivious to our existence, yet so captivating as to be toxic to our view of reality
Thus our two final survivors entwine, the last victims of this nameless curse
And Done
Well that ended quite nicely! The production was obviously still messy, featuring a whole bundle of static characters in moments that desperately called for fluid motion, but this was still a massive step up from the tragic second episode. It certainly helped that so much of the horror here was based in still images – the demented spiral forest, the underground temple, etcetera. And beyond that, the original material’s conclusion serves as a fine capstone to Umuzaki as a whole, aligning all of the preceding events beneath the general banner of cosmic horror, complete with a temple to a force beyond our understanding. Considering the wild diversity of terrors incorporated into this story’s general “spiral” umbrella, I’m quite impressed with how tidily it came together, and with Ito’s willingness to end this story on the despairing note it deserved. Compromised adaptation or not, Uzumaki is a hell of a tale, and I’m grateful to Nagahama and his team for doing the absolute best with the cards they were dealt. Anime will always be an art form defined by artists struggling against the folks holding the purse strings, and we clearly can’t win them all.
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