At this year’s Crunchyroll Expo in San Jose, California, fans from all over the world gathered together to celebrate anime, manga, games, and cosplay while the greater anime and manga industry held exhibits, screenings, panels, guest appearances, and announcements. One of those guests that were especially notable was the manga creator Junji Ito as this was his first-ever U.S appearance in his over 30-year career. During Ito’s live drawing session on the first Friday of the expo, Production I.G CEO Maki Terashima Furuta announced that an adaptation of one of Ito’s most notable works, Uzumaki (Spiral in English), was in the works and would premiere on Adult Swim’s Toonami block in 2020. The adaptation would be a miniseries directed by Hiroshi Nagahama, director of the Mushishi anime series, and will include a score from composer Colin Stetson, best known for his work on the films Hereditary (2018) and Color Out of Space (2019) as well as the 2018 game Red Dead Redemption 2. Following the lackluster live-action film adaptation of the series and the poor reception to the Junji Ito Collection, an anime adaptation of his short stories, it seems as if the new series would be ill-fated, but with the status of the collaborators and Uzumaki being one of Ito’s most popular and rich stories, it should be a great and mesmerizing retelling that audiences will be captured by.
Junji Ito was born in 1963 in Japan and from an early age was attracted to writing and drawing manga. He would work as a dental technician and only draw manga as a hobby until he submitted a short story to the Japanese magazine Gekkan Halloween in 1987 that would later receive recognition from one of Ito’s manga inspirations Kazuo Umezu as well as the Kazuo Umezu prize. This story, Tomie, would later get serialized in the magazine and continue for 13 years while receiving multiple live-action film adaptations and a TV series. Following the serialization Ito began to work on manga full-time, continuing Tomie and working on other short horror stories and longer continuous stories like Uzumaki and Gyo. His works are notable for the incomprehensible and unnatural events that drive the stories and the world forward while also dealing with concepts like body horror, the end of society, and death. His works have seen multiple adaptations as well as different recognition and awards, particularly for Ito’s Uzumaki.
Uzumaki is a horror manga series written and illustrated by Junji Ito and was a weekly serial in the manga magazine Big Comic Spirits from 1998 to 1999. After its completion, it was released into three volumes by Japanese publisher Shogakukan and later as a full omnibus version. In 2001 Viz Media would release an English-language serialization in the magazine Pulp and it would end in 2002. Later in 2013, an English omnibus version was released. The story saw recognition from many different sources: it was nominated for an Eisner Award, The Young Adult Library Services Association listed it as one of the “Great Graphic Novels for Teens”, IGN placed it as #2 on their Top 10 Horror/Thriller Manga list, in Jason Thompson’s blog House of 1000 Manga, he said that it revolves around “a certain nightmarish, fatalistic way of looking at the world”, etc. The story came about from Ito’s desire to create a story of strange changes occurring to a family in a traditional Japanese terraced house. He wanted the building to be incredibly long like his own childhood house, and in his drawings he eventually landed upon the shape of a spiral, noting that the spiral was a “mysterious pattern”, later describing the writing of the story as an attempt to learn the secrets of the spiral. In 2006 Ito stated that he was still uncertain of what the spiral might stand for, but thought that it may be representative of the concept of infinity. It also partly came about because Ito saw the positive representation of spirals in media and was inspired to subvert this and use them for horror. The story has been described as Lovecraftian with even Ito stating that “Lovecraft’s expressionism with regard to atmosphere greatly inspires my creative impulse.” It makes sense when the plot of the story follows citizens of the fictional city Kurōzu-Cho, a small town that is plagued by a supernatural curse involving the physical manifestation of spirals and an unhealthy obsession with them that borders on hypnotization. Even before the series was fully released, production began on a live film adaptation from director Akihiro Higuchi. Higuchi expressed interest in the story and said that "the allure of Uzumaki is not that the Uzumaki itself is scary but rather the changes in the people caught up in it.” The studio tried to capture that same essence in their film, but ultimately the film was not very successful, being ineffective in capturing the same fright and dread that characterized the manga.
The film adaptations are where Ito’s works saw the most success outside of Japan, but he saw a great surge in public attention when his short horror stories from many different collections were animated as Junji Ito Collection and released on the Crunchyroll anime streaming platform in 2018. The series premiered in January and ran for 12 episodes while also being broadcast worldwide in eight different languages. In addition to Ito’s short manga stories that were adapted, two original video animations (OVAs) were also released that adapted Ito’s Tomie manga. Fans of Ito’s works had been hopeful and excited for an adaptation of his creative and carefully constructed work, but overall they and other newcomers to Ito’s work were disappointed. There was an agreement that the series sparked a new interest in the author’s manga, but overall the consensus also agreed that the series saw incredibly mediocre and sometimes bad animation as well as a bland color pallet and a lack of dynamism or movement that should come with an animated adaptation. Fans were convinced that following the poor animation and negative reception for the multiple adaptations, any future work getting adapted was far from possible, or at least any competent work that truly captured the essence and artistry of Ito’s works was far from possible. Things changed when the team working on the new Uzumaki adaptation was released alongside a trailer that showed the unique aesthetic of the manga was kept alongside true black-and-white animation.
Fans were extremely excited to see that the classic horror story they already loved would be in good hands. Production I.G has worked on notable anime series in the past like Psycho-Pass, Attack on Titan, Ghost in the Shell, Neon Genesis Evangelion: End of Evangelion, and many other works that have seen great acclaim from both critics and audiences alike. Their reputation is as sound as the new series’ director, Hiroshi Nagahama, an animator and director best known for working on series like Revolutionary Girl Utena, Fruits Basket, Detroit Metal City, and the highly praised anime adaptation of Mushishi. The series is one of the most popular and highly rated anime series and even won the Tokyo Anime Award while it was airing. Along with those two spectacular names attached to the project, composer Colin Stetson will produce the music for the series. Colin Stetson is a performer and composer known for working with groups like Arcade Fire and Bon Iver while also creating various solo releases, but has come more into the public eye in the last few years for his pivotal and hair-raising scores in works like Hereditary and the game Red Dead Redemption 2. His unnatural and almost otherworldly works of continuous and ever-looping horns appear as if they are only going to elevate the insecure and unnerving atmosphere that Uzumaki already contains.
The series will also be released through the Toonami portion of Adult Swim’s block on the Cartoon Network channel. Adult Swim announced a partnership with Production I.G’s USA branch to create the series that will air in 2020. The Senior Vice President On-Air for Adult Swim Jason DeMarco said about the partnership, “As a huge fan of Junji Ito, I’m thrilled to be able to tackle one of his signature works, with a team of amazing creators who are all equally devoted to doing justice to this monumental work of horror manga.” Crunchyroll has also entered into a partnership with Adult Swim after joining the WarnerMedia company. The company announced a new restructuring as well that allows the two companies to work in partnership, and this series is one of the results of that partnership. Toonami and Adult Swim have always served as a taste of anime for the West, but this is one of the first times that original anime content that’s not a revival has come from the partnership. Adult Swim worked with Production I.G a couple of years ago to create new episodes for the anime FLCL, but this is going to be the first wholly original production. Fans are excited, and if this adaptation works it signals a great push forward for both adaptations of Ito’s work as well as original anime produced in collaboration with the West.
