Adult Swim completes the bait-and-switch. The second episode of Uzumaki is out, and it's an anime.

For those who don't know, Junji Ito is considered the master of horror manga. He's most famous for his body horror and lovecraftian stories about people struggling against unknown/unknowable forces. For years people have wanted to see faithful anime adaptions of Ito's work, which many studios have tried and failed.

Some examples and their scores on MAL:

The Junji Ito Collection 6.54/10

Junji Ito: Maniac 6.64/10

Gyo 5.33/10

For those who don't know, anything under a 7 on MAL is typically bad, and anything under 6 is garbage.

One of his most famous stories is Uzumaki, Japanese for swirl. From Wikipedia:

Uzumaki follows a high-school teenager, Kirie Goshima ; her boyfriend, Shuichi Saito; and the citizens of the small, quiet Japanese town of Kurouzu-cho (黒渦ー町, Black Vortex Town), which is enveloped by supernatural events involving spirals.

In 2019 an anime was announced for Uzumaki at the Crunchyroll expo. Here's the announcement thread on /r/anime.

Originally planned for release in 2020, it was delayed to 2021.

And then 2022.

And then indefinitely.

And then 2023.

But in 2024 it came, and it was glorious.

Drawn in black and white with rotoscoping, the first episode looked pretty good. A little rushed, but it received glowing reviews on /r/anime

https://old.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1frwg9z/uzumaki_episode_1_discussion/

I understand why the show took as long as it did. The pacing is a bit fast, but this is an incredible adaptation.

Man that was so good, unsettling, and creepy. I'm so excited for the rest of this.

Was anyone else grinning like a crazy person? Just me?

This is just terrific! I was surprised to realize they're adapting multiple stories simultaneously, but it makes sense. A lot of them take place over multiple days, so it's not crazy to think some are happening at the same time. I'm impressed at how organically they blended them together though.

even the crabs that infest nu-/a/ seemed to (mostly) enjoy it. So how did it look? Pretty decent I think:

Everyone was looking forward to the rest of the series (only 4 episodes by the way), and with bated breath, all awaited episodes 2. So how was episode 2 you ask?

Yeah, /r/anime is not happy https://old.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1fxayq1/uzumaki_episode_2_discussion/

I don't understand how this even happened. The anime was delayed three times, with it in total taking over 5 years from its announcement. Just to produce 4 episodes in black and white. Only for the animation to fall apart on the 2nd episode.

I was willing to overlook the extremely rapid pacing for good animation. As I knew, they only had 4 episodes but to get goofy animation and rapid pacing at the same time.

5-7 years in the makings and endless delays _"to make sure it lives up to the standards"_ and we get THIS? wtf? the lies. we're not even getting a full season but only 4 episodes, it's not that hard to keep the quality for this kind of short run.

I'm literally so devastated.

/a/ is clowning on it, as one would expect.

So how could this possibly happen?

So where do we go from here? I don't know, but thankfully there are only two episodes left, so we'll all be put out of our misery soon. If you want to follow along for this shit show, new episodes come out Saturday nights for the next two week

The stupid fricking format preview stopped working halfway through, so I have no idea how this post is actually going to look. If it's fricked then oh well, I'm supposed to be working right now so I might fix it later, there's some other things I want to add, so I'll do it then. This is my second try btw