Enter the spiral of Adult Swim's Uzumaki anime on September 28, and get your eyes wrapped around today's brand new dizzying trailer.
Adapted from the manga of the same name by the legendary Junji Ito, Uzumaki is directed by Hiroshi Nagahama (Mushishi, The Flowers of Evil), and follows:
Kurouzu-cho, a small fogbound town on the coast of Japan, is cursed. According to Shuichi Saito, the withdrawn boyfriend of teenager Kirie Goshima, their town is haunted not by a person or being but a pattern: UZUMAKI, the spiral—the hypnotic secret shape of the world.
The series has been in development since 2019, undergoing various pandemic-related delays, with Nagahama and the animation team restructuring the project entirely. It will be the first Uzumaki adaptation since Higuchinsky’s live-action film released during the ‘J-horror boom‘ of the early 2000s.
In a new interview with Vulture, Jason DeMarco, the show’s executive producer and Adult Swim’s SVP of anime and action series, explains how the show almost didn't make it:
“The pandemic completely stopped production on the show for close to a year. It was the single biggest impact […] 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.”
Ito himself has seen the series and, excitingly, teases that it “lives up to [his] expectations.”
In the Vulture piece, DeMarco also revealed that he and his team got a little too deep into the insanity-inducing spirals, even having themselves blessed at a shrine:
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 […] I still see spirals. Everyone who worked on the show does — millions and millions of them. […] 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.”
If we weren't sold already, we sure as hell are now.
Via Vulture: Uzumaki’s four-episode run will air Saturday nights on Adult Swim’s Toonami block starting 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.
