Fans of horror anime just got a devastating blow, as Adult Swim and Production I.G's upcoming adaptation of Junji Ito's Uzumaki gets delayed until next year. The good news is that they've also released the first clip of the show, and it looks beautifully haunting and creepy.
The announcement comes from Jason DeMarco, the co-creator and Executive Producer of Adult Swim (and is also a producer on the recently announced War of the Rohirrim anime movie), who shared the bad news about the show's delay due to COVID and changes to animation productions. Along with the news, DeMarco shared a video where the anime director himself, Hiroshi Nagahama, apologized for the lack of updates for Uzumaki and shared our first look at the show.
As Nagahama explains, COVID has had tremendous impact on the Japanese anime industry, especially the production of Uzumaki, as they had to restructure their entire plan for making the show, which Nagahama says requires twice as many animators as their normal projects at Production I.G. Even as animation prevailed when live-action productions around the world stopped, Japanese studios are much more conservative and were slower in allowing work-from-home solutions than studios in the West.
Thankfully, it seems like progress is nevertheless being made, as seen from the impressive first clip, which captures the black-and-white, hand-drawn aesthetic of Ito's original work, resulting in what feels like a true manga come to life. The animation in the character movement looks somehow off and creepy, fitting the tone of the original story, as well as the Hereditary-esque atmospheric music by Colin Stetson.
Ito is one of the most celebrated names in Japanese horror, and his manga Uzumaki is one of his creepiest and best-known works. It follows the citizens of a fictional city being plagued by a supernatural curse involving all kinds of spiral patterns, which soon enough turns deadly when citizens start dying gruesome deaths. Uzumaki is a bit of a psychological horror as it shows the citizens of the town slowly going insane, but there is plenty of disturbing body-horror imagery to satisfy hardcore fans of the genre. As Nagahama himself teases in the video, "there are lots of scary and grotesque scenes."
Uzumaki is set to air on Adult Swim in October 2022. In the meantime, check out the creepy first clip below: