Uzumaki

Honestly probably the best anime I have ever seen, it feels as if the manga has come to life, quite literally through the animation style, the fact people have given anything other than masterpiece is a travesty, if you know the manga of Junji Ito you will love this, if not I suppose that is why people aren't appreciating it.

Regardless, as a fan of both horror and the amazing Junji Ito I absolutely adored this and how well it was done, his work is always disturbing in a captivating way which makes you fell enticed to the world he has created, this anime is ... no different.

I watched it yesterday and I will be watching again in the weekend to share the experience with my friend, thank you to everyone who took part in making this masterpiece.

What a shame. After all those years of waiting for a good adaptation of one of the most famous manga created by Junji Ito, we got a show that is, at best, strongly mediocre.

It's a shame, really. Episode 1 was brilliant, after all. Simply beautiful artsy art, smooth animation, great direction that suceeded in building up the atmosphere of uncanyness and mysteriousness... Everything was polished; everything felt top-notch. And then episode 2 was released. A huge quality drop in every aspect, mostly when it comes to animation and direction. I'm tolerant and used to quality drops in long-running series, but come on - Uzumaki anime ... consists only of four episodes, not four hundred. And yet, its second episode was not only painful to watch, but also upsetting, given how good its predecessor looked like. Heck, even the overall tone of this adaptation seemed to change for the worse. Like I said before, I'm pretty tolerant when it comes to that kind of things in anime, so me finding such radical change simply unacceptable and pathetic really makes one think about the intensity of the lack of quality that the discussed thing has.

This anime is faithful to the source material, even if it has some modifications or omissions here and there, which is normal for an animated adaptation of an illustrated series. Too bad that at the same time most of the episodes are simply badly animated. They leave a bad impression, make the whole experience rather unpleasant, and if mixed with rather mediocre direction (too chaotic at times, mostly on the aforementioned ep. 2, but appearing also on episodes 3 and 4).

The only elements that I can't tell anything negative about are those related to the audio side of this series, I mean voice acting and music. The latter is something you'd expect from watching an anime. The voice acting industry in Japan has a lot of very talented and skilled voice actors, after all. As for the latter element, while the soundtrack isn't groundbreaking, it i well-executed and, along with the strong voice acting, helps to mitigate the impact of the poor animation in some scenes, making them slightly more bearable to watch.

Uzumaki anime will surely not be forgotten in the future, after the season during which Uzumaki anime had its premiere ends (Fall 2024). Though, in this case, it's not a compliment. It's better to be forgotten than to be mentioned as an example of one of the biggest anime disappointments of the 2020s decade.

This is probably the most disappointed I've been by an anime in a while. If not for the hype prior to release as "the first good Junji Ito adaptation" I may not have been as let down, but here we are. Can't go anywhere without talking about the animation, even after the first trailers I was already skeptical about the use of CGI, yes its possible for it to look good, and episode one I would say is once of the better uses of CGI in anime I have seen, it still wasn't right. For going as far to be black and white to be ... closer to the manga, the CGI and smooth movements were too off-putting, but not bad, good even, but not perfect. Then we get to the rest of the episodes, I'm not even going to waste my breath on this, it was horrible, insane downgrade in quality and a very big let down. The issues don't end there though, the pacing was also changed from the original manga, while not all bad, a lot of it threw off the tension that the original had building as it progressed further and further down the spiral. Some content had even been completely cut or shortened to where it just lost all of its impact. There are no redeeming qualities in this anime other than I would say it soundtrack, and at that point, put the soundtrack on in the background and read the manga.