‘I Still See Spirals’: How Uzumaki Finally Made It to TV

“It’s a miracle it got made and we all survived it.” Photo: Junji ITO, Shogakukan/Production I.G., LLC

This story was originally published September 5 and has been updated ahead of Uzumaki’s premiere.

For five years, updates on Uzumaki, the highly anticipated anime adaptation of Junji Ito’s acclaimed manga, came at a snail’s pace. Would the supernatural horror teased in 2019 see the light of day or would it be sucked into the cancellation vortex? As it turned out, co-producers Adult Swim and Production I.G were taking their time to obsessively perfect the horror anime’s twists and turns — starting with every eerie spiral that shows up. The timing didn’t help, either: The COVID-19 pandemic threatened to derail the show entirely.

“The pandemic completely stopped production on the show for close to a year. It was the single biggest impact,” says Jason DeMarco, the show’s executive producer and Adult Swim’s SVP of anime and action series. “Our crew was small, so having even a few members and their families getting deathly ill was a huge blow to both the production and our morale. It was very challenging to bring the show back from the dead.”

Their efforts, however, have borne fruit. The animated Uzumaki, which is directed by anime veteran Hiroshi Nagahama (Mushi-Shi), looks both incredible and utterly horrifying. Not many anime stay so faithful to their manga source material that they’re willing to render their images fully in black and white, and from the new trailer Adult Swim’s shown us and other imagery, the animation quality certainly looks like it took five years or longer to get right. “Our goal was to get as close as possible to something truly unsettling, something Ito-sensei does in much of his work but we had not felt in previous animated adaptations,” says DeMarco.

What, exactly, is an “uzumaki”?

The word translates to “whirlpool,” “swirl,” or “vortex” in Japanese. In Ito’s three-volume manga and in the show, the shapes appear everywhere in the sleepy town of Kurouzu-cho — in water, on walls, in clouds, in hair, on characters’ faces, and (not to spoil too much, but eventually) as the characters themselves and beyond. The story circles teens Kirie and her boyfriend, Shuichi, who first notice the demonic spirals.

Exactly how they appear is what makes the manga and the show so visually arresting. One starts as a curious crescent-shaped scar on a girl’s forehead before twisting and growing to suck up half her face and more: It swallows up her right eyeball and only ends when, well, it’s best not to spoil it all. The spirals are insatiable, inexorable, and all-encompassing. They also drive people mad. In a way that makes them a perfect horror “monster,” one that Ito apparently came up with while drawing the long, angular Japanese-style homes he grew up in. And the trouble that Kirie and Shuichi find themselves in as they try to fight for their lives or escape the phenomena only escalates.

“I still see spirals. Everyone who worked on the show does — millions and millions of them,” DeMarco says. Before kicking off the production, his team even did a blessing at a shrine to ward off any supernatural forces. “It didn’t work! Without the slightest hyperbole, all of us on the staff truly believe our project was cursed by the spiral. It’s a miracle it got made and we all survived it.”

Photo: Junji ITO, Shogakukan/Production I.G., LLC

Why is it animated in black and white?

The idea actually came from Flying Lotus — DeMarco’s friend and a longtime Adult Swim soundtrack collaborator. “When I told him we were close to closing a deal to make the show, he said ‘You should do it in black and white,’” DeMarco recalls. “I thought that was an amazing idea and suggested it to Nagahama in our first meeting about the show. He said he had actually been thinking about the same thing and that he was thrilled I suggested it.”

Creatively, it serves to reproduce the look of Ito’s manga. To achieve that, the animators used a blend of traditional animation and motion capture: “Nagahama’s idea was to use motion capture and build everything in CG, then re-draw all of it, which he felt would give the animators the ability to tackle Ito-sensei’s line work, which is incredibly detailed,” DeMarco says, and the show ended up being much more expensive and time consuming than the team had hoped. “The decision to produce the show in black and white ended up being a huge production issue, but obviously it looks terrific.”

You said there’s a new trailer?

Honestly, it’s pretty fucking gnarly! Tongues twist, tornadoes rip through the streets, skies curdle into darkness, and people die indiscriminately — some to the spirals themselves and others to the collective madness they engender. The trailer delivers hell on earth in monochrome, and from its 90 seconds, hell on earth is pretty crisply drawn.

When does it come spin out?

Uzumaki’s four-episode run will air Saturday nights on Adult Swim’s Toonami block starting tomorrow, September 28, at 12:30 a.m. Each episode will debut in Japanese with English subtitles, with English-dubbed encores of each episode airing on the following Thursday night, starting October 3. On streaming, Max will have both the Japanese and English-dubbed versions the day after they initially debut.