Posted in: Anime, Crunchyroll, TV | Tagged: anime, Crunchyroll, horror, junji ito, manga, streaming, Tomie, uzumaki

Uzumaki: Manga Creator Junji Ito Plays Role in Anime Adaptation

Uzumaki, the upcoming anime adaptation of Junji Ito's classic Lovecraftian horror manga, has a new surprise: it looks like the sensei himself is going to have a voice role in the show. This was revealed in a 2-minute behind-the-scenes video shared on the anime's official Twitter account.

"Uzumaki" means "spiral" in Japanese, and that's as direct a title as you can get. It is the first Junji Ito horror manga the West was exposed to in the 1990s even though he had already created several well-known horror manga series and stories that made him famous in Japan and the rest of Asia, like Tomie, about a demonic girl who keeps coming back from the dead to haunt the men she teased and tormented into killing her. Uzumaki is a more epic exercise if Lovecraftian cosmic horror where the teenage hero and heroine discover the town they're in is collapsing into an apocalypse of spirals – hair, holes, then bodies, buildings, the landscape itself – that threaten to engulf the whole world. No one is safe. There is no salvation, only the inevitability of doom from an unfathomable supernatural horror that is utterly indifferent to the fear and panic of human suffering. It is a deeply Gnostic view of the world. There was actually a low-budget live-action movie adaptation made that is mercifully forgotten and barely mentioned these days.

https://twitter.com/UzumakiAnime1/status/1474477384128557056

In the video, Ito-sensei is seen going into the ADR studio to record voices under the guidance of the anime series' director Hiroshi Nagahama. They scrupulously muted his recording segment so as to keep exactly who he's voicing a secret. It might be the voice acting equivalent of Alfred Hitchcock making a cameo in his own movies. You can't get a more ringing endorsement of the adaptation from the original creator than this. It looks like the adaptation of Uzumaki is being made with the utmost deference to Ito-sensei.

Given that every character in a Junji Ito story ends up wide-eyed, sweaty, and crying out in terror, let's hope Ito-sensei gets to do that too in his role. It would be the perfect meta punchline.

Uzumaki is due to premiere on Crunchyroll in 2022.

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