Uzumaki is a popular late ‘90s horror manga that fans have always wanted to see turned into an anime that lives up to the incredible art of creator Junji Ito’s original work. Recently, it seemed like Adult Swim was finally set to deliver with an adaptation five years in the making. The first episode certainly lived up to the hype, then episode two dropped and fans were left scratching their heads at the shocking drop off in animation quality.
After the latest episode of Uzumaki aired this week, the reactions started rolling in. “The quality drop in episode 2 of Uzumaki is actually embarrassing wow,” wrote one fan. “My day is ruined…” wrote another. Clips showing stilted scenes went viral on social media. It was so bad in places it seemed like only some major production snafu could have been responsible.
Then Adult Swim executive producer Jason DeMarco shared a cryptic explanation on Bluesky (via Gizmodo) that was later deleted but not before it started making the rounds on Twitter and Reddit. “I can’t talk about what went down but we were screwed over,” he wrote. “The options were A) not finish and air nothing and call it a loss, B) Just finish and air ep 1 and leave it incomplete or C) run all four, warts and all. Out of respect for the hard work we chose C.”
It seems like maybe the production team was aware the series would be criticized, but maybe not as harshly as the actual reactions ended up being. DeMarco teased that there were particular individuals responsible for the shoddy work, but wouldn’t name who. “I didn’t think the actions of just one or two people should be the reason it never saw the light of day,” he wrote.
Adult Swim did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Uzumaki is about a quiet Japanese village beset by a curse where mysterious spiral shapes begin to take over, creating paranormal effects and corrupting people’s lives and their surroundings. That unique horror premise is a perfect, but also extremely challenging, concept to illustrate in motion. First teased back in 2019, the assumption was that five years meant everything had been meticulously crafted for the four-episode Toonami run this fall.
“The pandemic completely stopped production on the show for close to a year. It was the single biggest impact,” DeMarco told Vulture last month. “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.”
But even by that point there was no inkling of any last-minute sacrifices or trade-offs in terms of the full production. Now fans are left to wonder what exactly happened to derail the team’s ambition and whether things will recover in episode three or be equally rough. Is Uzumaki another victim of Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s brutal cuts? Is it related to small pieces of Cartoon Network randomly disappearing over the last month?
The mystery, like Uzumaki’s vortexes, remains. At least for now.