Adult Swim Whirls Out 'Uzumaki' Official Trailer
Boy it’s difficult to configure “spiral” puns in different ways
We’re only weeks away from the premiere of Adult Swim’s long-awaited miniseries adaptation of Junji Ito’s horror manga Uzumaki, happening on Toonami Saturday, September 28 at 12:30 AM. The network has released its official trailer for the fullest look yet.
Uzumaki is about the people of the fictional Kurōzu-cho, plagued by a supernatural curse involving spirals. They form in everything, from a strange whirlwind to billowing smoke from the crematorium, to the residents themselves being unnaturally contorted while their eyes and tongues take the shape too. Kirie Goshima, a high school girl born and raised in the town, is given an opportunity by former classmate Shuichi Saito urging “Let’s leave this town together”, attempting to escape the curse but can they truly do so?
Uzumaki was first announced in August 2019, Jason DeMarco, the show’s executive producer and Adult Swim’s Senior Vice President of anime and action series has detailed just how much the COVID-19 pandemic declared 7 months later derailed Uzumaki’s production. “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.” Even from the trailer the faithfulness to source material is present, with the coloring in black and white, and the story matching. “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,” says DeMarco.
Spirals are the signature image of Uzumaki, with the word in particular meaning “whirlpool”, “swirl”, and “vortex”, and their everywhere appearance also including the water, on walls, in clouds, in hair, on characters’ faces, including a girl’s forehead before twisting and growing to suck up half her face, consuming her right eyeball until it’s everything. One simply starts as a curious crescent-shaped scar. They are insatiable, inexorable, all-encompassing, enough to drive people mad. “I still see spirals. Everyone who worked on the show does — millions and millions of them,” DeMarco says. Before production started, his team performed a blessing at a shrine to ward off any supernatural forces. “It didn’t work! 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.”
The idea to not make the series in color and instead keep it black and white like manga pages came from Flying Lotus, DeMarco’s friend and a longtime Adult Swim soundtrack collaborator. “When I told him we were close to closing a deal to make the show, he said ‘You should do it in black and white,’” DeMarco recalls. “I thought that was an amazing idea and suggested it to Nagahama in our first meeting about the show. He said he had actually been thinking about the same thing and that he was thrilled I suggested it.” To make such happen, the animators employed a mix of traditional animation and motion capture: “Nagahama’s idea was to use motion capture and build everything in CG, then re-draw all of it, which he felt would give the animators the ability to tackle Ito-sensei’s line work, which is incredibly detailed,” DeMarco says, and the show ended up being much more expensive with much more time spent on it than the team had originally envisioned, ultimately being a credible factor in the five-year journey. “The decision to produce the show in black and white ended up being a huge production issue, but obviously it looks terrific.”
As previously reported, Uzumaki doesn’t get the leadoff midnight slot because Rick and Morty: The Anime will be in that slot 7 episodes through its first season. Like the latter, Uzumaki will be getting subbed and dubbed airings, but unlike it be Toonami-forward and sub-first. Its English dub airings will be following the former’s in the Thursday 12:30 AM timeslot starting October 3 (again, Rick and Morty: The Anime has midnight). Being a four-episode miniseries when Rick and Morty: The Anime is on episode 7 means their finales will run together on Toonami.
The English cast includes Suzume and Zom 100’s Abby Trott as Kirie, Infinity Train and Breadwinners star Robbie Daymond, lately of Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War and frankly numerous animated projects voices Shuichi. Hyperforce Black Ranger Vesper Vazquez and Ladybug Marinette Dupain-Cheng herself Cristina Vee voices Azami Kurotani, while er Miraculous co-star Max Mittelman voices Katayama. There’s also Doug Stone as Kirie's father, Aaron LaPlante as Shuichi's father, and Digimon and South Park legend Mona Marshall as Shuichi's mother. The episodes will be available each Sunday on Max. Watch the trailer below.
Source: Vulture