It's a shame, really. Episode 1 was brilliant, after all. Simply beautiful artsy art, smooth animation, great direction that suceeded in building up the atmosphere of uncanyness and mysteriousness... Everything was polished; everything felt top-notch. And then episode 2 was released. A huge quality drop in every aspect, mostly when it comes to animation and direction. I'm tolerant and used to quality drops in long-running series, but come on - Uzumaki anime consists only of four episodes, not four hundred. And yet, its second episode was not only painful to watch, but also upsetting, given how good its predecessor looked like. Heck, even the overall tone of this adaptation seemed to change for the worse. Like I said before, I'm pretty tolerant when it comes to that kind of things in anime, so me finding such radical change simply unacceptable and pathetic really makes one think about the intensity of the lack of quality that the discussed thing has.
This anime is faithful to the source material, even if it has some modifications or omissions here and there, which is normal for an animated adaptation of an illustrated series. Too bad that at the same time most of the episodes are simply badly animated. They leave a bad impression, make the whole experience rather unpleasant, and if mixed with rather mediocre direction (too chaotic at times, mostly on the aforementioned ep. 2, but appearing also on episodes 3 and 4).
The only elements that I can't tell anything negative about are those related to the audio side of this series, I mean voice acting and music. The latter is something you'd expect from watching an anime. The voice acting industry in Japan has a lot of very talented and skilled voice actors, after all. As for the latter element, while the soundtrack isn't groundbreaking, it i well-executed and, along with the strong voice acting, helps to mitigate the impact of the poor animation in some scenes, making them slightly more bearable to watch.
Uzumaki anime will surely not be forgotten in the future, after the season during which Uzumaki anime had its premiere ends (Fall 2024). Though, in this case, it's not a compliment. It's better to be forgotten than to be mentioned as an example of one of the biggest anime disappointments of the 2020s decade.
