Uzumaki started out with a banger first episode that captured my attention immediately. I continued paying close attention for the second episode, now knowing there would only be four installments. The third episode was disappointing. I began to think that Uzumaki lost its chance to be good. However, after seeing the fourth and final episode, I now think the series did a decent job of saving itself. The end result is a fairly enjoyable Junji Itou adaptation. I’ll go over my thoughts on this episode in a few sections.
Article Contents
- Tornado Powers and Forbidden Meat
- The Vortex of Kurouzu-Town
- The Truth of the Curse and Continuing the Cycle
Tornado Powers and Forbidden Meat
A girl named Chie came to Kurouzu-town to investigate the missing people who disappeared in that area. She was immediately hit by tornado that wrecked her vehicle. Chie finds herself stuck in Kurouzu-town, and it’s a zone of mass destruction. There are literally dead people crushed by fallen houses. Miniature tornados appear at the drop of a hat. Luckily, Kirie and Mitsuo pull Chie into hiding with them.
There are also people who use the tornado’s power to move around and cause chaos. They are called the Butterfly Gang. It was hard to take the Butterfly Gang very seriously as they flew around using tornado powers. It was just surreal and goofy. But things got creepy again soon enough. We saw members of the Butterfly Gang killing snail-people and using their flesh for meat. (The number of snail-people has been increasing as the town became ever more cursed by spirals.)
It’s honestly pretty disturbing when you stop to think about eating the snail-people. We don’t know what level of consciousness, if any, they might still have. There could be a person’s mind still trapped in there, unable to think clearly or communicate. Even if there was absolutely nothing human about them left, it would still seem wrong to roast or devour such helpless creatures while still alive. Additionally, the meat looks gross, and it seems that eating a lot of it will get you cursed by the spiral even faster.
Sadly, in this episode, Kirie’s younger brother became a snail person. However, as far as we know, he (Mitsuo) didn’t get cruelly killed or eaten. Kirie shooed him away and he escaped down a seaside cliff. Though Kirie promised to come back for the snail boy, that agreement would never be fulfilled. Nobody in the town would escape in the end.
The Vortex of Kurouzu-Town
As people tried to investigate what was happening in Kurouzu-Town, all attempts to report or stop the chaos failed. Media helicopters got wiped out by mini-tornados. Whirlpools appeared in the oceans and swallowed a fleet of rescue vessels. The whirlpools would also stop anyone from trying to leave via the water. When people tried to leave the town on foot, they had no luck, either. The curse of the spiral was keeping everyone locked inside and preventing outside forces from interrupting.
It’s easy to walk or drive into Kurouzu, but it’s impossible to get out again with the town acting like a vortex that warps space and time. The tunnel leading out of the town was supposedly at a slight upward incline – but now, the incline was literally 90 degrees, so continuing up the tunnel became impossible. In addition, the trails in the woods turned back on themselves, reconnecting and looping in trippy ways.
Kirie and a small group of survivors found this out the hard way, spending an unspecified amount of time wandering through the wooded outskirts of the town, unable to leave. Eventually, they also figured out that the vortex was altering the normal flow of time. Time sped up toward the center of the spirals and slowed down father away, on the edges. So, when Kirie came back to the main area of Kurouzu, it had only been a day or so. But for Mr. Tanizaki in the center, it had been months or even years.
The idea of something like a vortex brings to light the theme of cosmic horror. Similar phenomena such as black holes are uncommon and therefore frightening and poorly understood. Things that mess with time and space are fundamentally unfathomable to us, bringing a sense of awe along with the fear. I liked the vortex setup of Kurouzu-town because it captured the basic idea of the unknowable, otherworldly terror.
The Truth of the Curse and Continuing the Cycle
Kirie, Shuuichi, and Chie – the last survivors of Kirie’s family and friends – returned to the main area of Kurouzu-town. They saw a stunning sight. The entire town had become a spiral. All the destroyed houses were rebuilt into a continuous line of houses that wrapped around in a spiral. These row-houses were also full of hundreds of people with their cursed spiral bodies hopelessly entangled. Chie got caught up among them and was swallowed into the mass of squishy, snakey bodies.
At the center of the spiral of houses is Dragonfly Pond, where Kirie’s dad used to collect mud for clay. According to Kirie, the pond swallowed up four typhoons. The pond is clearly the center of the spiral power. After losing Chie to the spiral curse, Kirie and Shuuichi headed to Dragonfly Pond. They found an ancient staircase and follow it deep down, underneath the lake itself. This is where they discovered the truth of the curse.
Underneath the pond, there was a massive open area with a drill-like structure sticking upward. At the base of the drill, there was a huge series of structures – a bit like an ancient city from Minecraft, but full of spirals. The anime describes this thing as a ruin. But it isn’t just any old ruin – it has a mind of its own. It acts according to some kind of cycle. Every few hundred years, it activates, beginning the curse of the spiral in the lands surrounding Dragonfly Pond. When the drill makes contact with the town, the cycle is complete, and the curse is over until the next iteration.
The spiral curse was caused by some kind of ancient, otherworldly technology. It was probably more like a weapon system than an area for living in. Maybe it was planted by aliens, or maybe the people of the past were advanced enough to make such a weapon. But how does the technology work? What are the spirals it generates? How do those conceptual shapes warp time and space into a vortex?
At the end of the day, the final reveal tells us less than I had hoped. There are still many unanswered questions, including basic ones like, “Why do the spirals hurt and mutate human life?” But I’m also glad for the wishy-washy, partial explanation we got. It means the rest is entirely up to interpretation. It’s nice to have room to imagine.
I also like the theme that the curse of the spirals is almost like a natural phenomenon. It will continue to happen in long cycles. Shuuichi and Kirie are dead (or perhaps living as immortal, unmoving mutants underground), but in the future, the cycle will continue. New people just like Kirie and Shuuichi will move into the Kurouzu area, experience the terror of the spirals, and watch the chaos unfold. It might be in a fifty years or a thousand years, but it will happen again.
I felt happy seeing Shuuichi and Kirie embrace at the end. I was expecting Shuuichi to succumb to the curse in a much more tragic way, like losing his mind completely. While he did have some moments of passing psychosis, he stuck it out until the very end and stayed strong for Kirie. Very romantic! That’s the end of Uzumaki. Like I said, I think the show did a decent job saving itself after the underwhelming third episode. Uzumaki succeeded as an imperfect but entertaining and creative piece of media.
(Edit/PS: I would also like to say that the sound direction in the last five minutes of the episode – and in the after credits scene – was peak. That ending was pure cinema because of the awesome music and audio timing.)
~Thanks for reading~
~
Anime Rants 