Stills // Uzumaki (2000) trailer and Uzumaki (2024) trailer
By: Magnus Blanchard-Rockhill & Emmalee Anglemyer
Staff-Writers
“Uzumaki”, a horror manga written and illustrated by Junji Ito, follows two high schoolers as they watch their town fall victim to a cyclical curse relating to the idea and shape of the spiral. The new four-episode adaptation released on Adult Swim ended recently, but it fell short of fan expectations.
Initially serialized, “Uzumaki” has since been compiled into a 648-page omnibus. It has also received a handful of adaptations, including a video game, but today the focus will be on the 2000 film adaptation and the 2024 miniseries.
The miniseries in particular received mostly negative attention as it was released. The animation studio was switched after the first episode, and although I did not personally notice the difference in the animation enough to care, some people definitely did.
That said, the miniseries was… fine. It was an almost entirely faithful adaptation, but when adapting a print comic into an audiovisual medium, changes must be made. Ito’s beautiful, terrifying, full-page illustrations do not hold as much weight when displayed for a few seconds on a TV screen.
It seemed that the adaptation’s goal was to cram every event from every chapter of the story into four episodes, rather than making good TV. The pacing was fine in episode one, but fell apart in the rest. Story arcs like the jack-in-the-box boy, the lighthouse, and the pregnant mosquito vampire women (yes, you read that right) could have been cut for time with little to no impact on the overall story.
On the other hand, we have the live-action film – a 90-minute work of art released in 2000. It may not be a perfectly faithful adaptation – the ending, curse and main character all have differences – and yet, the movie is spectacular.
The camera work is crazy and beautiful and genuinely impressive. The set design is wonderful. The acting is believable, despite its ridiculousness. The CGI tends towards uncanny, but for a story so focused on the uncanny, it detracts nothing.
The story was adjusted to work more for a 90-minute film, which makes sense. Many plot points were cut for time, but what was left was cohesive and satisfying. More of a focus was placed on the relationship between Kirie and her boyfriend, Shuichi. The ending sequence, instead of a jaunty post-apocalyptic rush to the finish line, is a series of quiet panning shots over some beautifully rendered, disgustingly twisted figures corrupted by the town.
Overall, there was nothing completely wrong with the 2024 miniseries, though it may as well have been a slideshow of the manga panels. It was not a good adaptation in the literal sense, because it did not really adapt anything. There were no changes that would make it work better for the new medium, and this was to its detriment. The 2000 film took the story, content and overall vibe and made them work for a movie in a remarkable and incredibly fun way.
