As One Punch Man As the painful season 3 continues to roll out new installments, it often feels like it’s an abnormal disappointment among anime fans. Yet a year prior, the long-delayed release of Production I.G. and Adult Swim’s Uzumaki had already proven what true disappointment can look like. Beyond the degradations of the animation, it was its horrible pacing that broke fans’ hearts.
Officially announced during Crunchyroll Expo 2019, Uzumaki featured collaborative production from Production IG and Adult Swim. On the surface, everything looked good, with strong directors attached and a clear and visible dedication to adapting Junji Ito’s eerie visuals. However, the premiere acted as a smokescreen before the rest of the 4-episode miniseries, where the real betrayal of the source material took place.
Uzumaki Anime’s Failure Rivals One-Punch Man
If we were only to look Uzumaki episode #1, they wouldn’t see the problem. The grayscale scheme avoided the visual problems that plague other Ito anime adaptations. Character animation was smooth, scenes had depth without the backgrounds being too much emphasis. The dissonant mix of amelody and ambient music heightened the tension. It was the best Junji Ito anime adaptation ever made.
Uzumaki episode #1, in a way, felt like a microcosm of The One-Punch Man season 1: everything was where it needed to be, Hiroshi Nagahama’s direction of the series was strong, and it seemed like the best possible anime adaptation. By the premiere of Episode 2, these qualities are largely diminished, a noticeably condensed disappointment resembling The One-Punch Man seasons 2 and 3.
Although there was much lamenting about responsibility Uzumaki adaptation problems, rushing the final product was the real spiraling curse, circling the drain.
Each subsequent episode has traded the fluidity of small moments like Kirie’s vibrant, bustling classroom for stiff, static characters in similar situations. The running animation became awkward, especially in episode #2. Although there was much lamenting about responsibility Uzumaki adaptation problems, rushing the final product was the real spiraling curse, circling the drain.
Uzumaki and One-Punch Man have horrible pacing
With four episodes adapting 19 chapters, and missing the 20th chapter, “Galaxies”, Uzumaki the anime was painfully, noticeably rushed. The individual stories from different chapters were mixed together like B-stories, but absolutely lacked gravitas, in the case of “Twisted Souls”. As the series quickly reached its climax, new viewers likely didn’t have enough time to even care about the key characters’ struggles.
In the case of The one-punch man, however, the pacing issue is similar but nuanced. While the anime ranged from reasonably paced (season 1) to fast-paced (season 2), season 3 ventured into Yusuke Murata’s more detailed and expansive chapters, praised for their intricate details but completely absent from the series. Although it now only adapts 2 or 3 chapters, the source material for Season 3 is deceptively massive.
But in Uzumaki In this case, this pacing hurts it more, especially when combined with the animation downgrades. Complex animation opportunities were approached with cheap jumps like in Episode 4 to avoid renditions of a man writhing inside a giant snail shell. It would be one thing for the anime to be rushed, but Uzumaki the finale was incredibly lazy.
The result is a rushed production where every big moment from the manga feels unearned in anime form. Yamaguchi’s Jack-in-the-box return in episode 3 is terribly executed, if not scary or ironically funny. While One Punch Man the anime completely failed, at least it had more than one good episode, preceding its decade of waiting and disappointment.
