Junji Ito’s “Uzumaki” Gets Anime Adaptation

Junji Ito’s Beautiful Mind

No line expresses greater truth than “heavy is the head that wears the crown,” in reference to the pioneer works in the horror manga genre. Junji Ito first appeared in the horror manga scene in 1988 with short stories he wrote while working as a dental technician. That piece became his debut for Tomie (1988) in Monthly Halloween.

The centralized theme that always shown in his works, is skewing us his view of beauty, body, and obsession. Through the eyes of Junji Ito’s works, spirals can be made a content & story of weird obsession and amalgamation of bizarre imagery.

For a cult following that Junji Ito has among shōjo and shōnen, he had a fairly widespread audience throughout the years. With mainly popular among the shōjo camp, the typical beauty eyes and hand-drawn image of his works has its own unique distinction. The panel of body horror, and even nature prevails that act as an cosmic horror, is a contrast towards the beautiful character that he’s depicting.

His works including Tomie (1988), Souichi’s Diary of Delights(1997), Gyo (2001), Lovesick Dead (1997), and three of his piece were made into one tankobōn that consist of 16 volumes of his works titled, The Junji Ito Horror Comic Collection (1997).

Among his works, one manga stood out from the rest – Uzumaki or Spiral, fairly known among us fans as his best works to date, and rarely gets bad rep towards his works. On the other hand, the anime adaptation of The Junji Ito Horror Comic Collection (2018) is excruciatingly uncomfortable for us fans, with the mediocre animation and inability to endure the actual hand drawn aesthetics are some of the main factors of why it’s a flop.

Uzumaki, adult swim’s birthright

Throughout the years, Adult Swim’s Toonami in the United States has brought so much joy to us fans by presenting us with numerous variants and anime items alike. With Adult Swim’s reputation for delivering us strange, quirky, and enigmatic works throughout the years, and Toonami as their vehicle for bringing us the anime version of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki (2022), this pairing appears to be promising so far.

Hiroshi Nagahama, director of Adult Swim, Production I.G., and Drive animation studios, and his crew have already created two teasers, which are available on YouTube via Adult Swim’s channel. Colin Stetson, the man exclusively responsible for Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018), scored the teasers, ensuring that they sounded the way they should.

As seen in the first teaser, the score makes the scenery of Kurouzu-cho appear to be about to be engulfed by the spiral energy that surrounds it. Colin Stetson and Junji Ito’s art complements the magnificent animation preview seen in the latest Adult Swim and Hiroshi’s announcement of the series.

Watch Uzumaki on Toonami at Adult Swim on October 2022.