Imagine my surprise when I found out Uzumaki was getting an anime adaptation, produced by I.G USA and Williams Street (Adult Swim). While I’ve unfortunately never read Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, I did grow up watching a few of the live action adaptations of his work, namely Uzumaki (2000), and The Tomie Collection (Tomie (1998), Tomie: Another Face (1999), Tomie: Replay (2000), Tomie: Rebirth (2001), Tomie: Forbidden Fruit (2002)).

This iteration of Uzumaki is 4 short 30ish minute episodes encompassing the town of Kurouzu’s descent into utter madness as its denizens submit to the supernatural force known only as Uzumaki (Japanese, for spiral), emanating from the town’s central water feature Dragonfly Pond. The twisted transformative body horror presenting both hostile and docile creatures around every corner, often prefaced with some level of psychological break is enough to elicit a mirror-touch synesthesia at least once or twice no matter how used to strange, psychological, eldritch horror you are. If it weren’t for the change in quality of animation after the first episode this would have been a solid gold star from me. Hell I’m half tempted to give it a gold star anyway, the storytelling makes it very easy for me to look past the shift in animation quality, especially since it’s still very well done, just not the same level as the first episode. Go watch it on Max now, it’s worth your time. 10 stars, I will be watching this again… And again… And again… Circling… Spiraling… Giving myself to it…