what a boring slog Uzumaki was. the horror elements just did not work for me with the exception of a man crawling after a snail in episode 4 that produced just a slight shiver for like 1 second. and the story is just not told in a interactive or entertaining way. bland characters and their seemingly relaxed reaction to the bizarre things happing at time
first lets talk about the art style. the art style in of itself is just not that interesting if everything else is uninteresting. art is a window into the soul of the artist and the visuals/plot/art style/settings/music and so on are just tools the artist can use to express him/herself. these can alone or together come together and express something the artist wants out there like music in of itself does does not need anything else than the music to create a experience for someone else. When watching visual media you expect that all the elements the artist put in would work together to create a pleasant experience but Uzumaki just don't. having a rotoscope art style and pretty visuals and good music does not make up for how boring episode 1 really were and having bad visuals in ep 2-3 didn't really ruin my enjoyment for those and adding in ep1s visuals would just not enhance those episodes either. its a spiral of boredom
as for ep 1-2-3 and first half of 4 they are just hollow, vapid and lack emotions or anything really. im convinced there isint really a bigger message here because if so what would it be? would it be that obsession sprialing to doom? we see the dad in ep1 being obsessed with spiral, the mom obsessed with removing anything related to spirals, the guy that was peeking at the girl in i think ep 3(?) and obsessed over her, the girl that were obsessed with having the bigger hair, probably some more you get the point but why is obsession bad? thats not explored here at all. again it really just using some of these theme as a viachle for horror but again when the horror fails to work you are left with nothing. theres no comedy, no action, no romance, no deeper meaning, no waifus ye you get the point so its just boring
for the second part of episode 4. i kinda explained how the snail scene managed to get some reaction out me but the last moment where the protagonist have realized that the curse have spiraled so deep that resistance is futile and accepted her fate was a beautiful moment and here the the graphic greatly enchanted that experience from the girl walking on cursed people, the big structure in the middle and how light they made the room where all working to enchant that moment. the saving grace for this serie (it still gets 1 star from me)
any medium for artist to express itself comes with its upsides and downsides and one of the downside of film is that you can not choose the pace the information is delivered in. when you read a manga you yourself choose when you want to receive the next packet of information by choosing when to turn the page. this gives a interactive elements that films just dont have. Beastialmoon mentioned in a thread that the tension and dread that the manga gives might be by how the author handling the information by simply making you expect the next page to be more scary/dreadful then the one your reading then choosing if you want to jump in to that scarier page or not is now in your hands. since you dont know if the next page is actually going to be scarier than the one you are reading and have no idea what its going to contain your mind is going to have to fill that in for as long as you dont turn the page which in of itself might cause dread to build up and making the work scarier than it really is. furthermore once you actually turn the page there is often a large skip in information from panel to panel since manga dont draw frame by frame your mind might fill in what happenend from one panel to the next panel which means your mind might trick you into thinking the author have a scarier surrounding than it really is (well you filling in the horror elements is the authors intention but you).
if the author have crafted his horror around this interaction then there's no wonder the series fail and might be why the other of Junjis work have failed in the past aswell, they might be impossible to do a fatihful adoption to begin with. which begs the question, would a game like a telltale type of game with junjis work be kinda kino??? reading personnel and befalt reviews also suggests that Uzumaki might just be overrated work or have aged poorly. moments like this makes me wish i read the manga but i just could not be bothered and i i don't care about spewing BS aslong as the BS i peddle sounds cool 😎
kinda funny that the Uzumaki is so obsessed at making as much as possible be spirals but then at the end its revealed that the city's follows a cyclical pattern where a city is raised -> city is spirals into chaos -> the victim of the spiral builds spiral shaped building just to be consume by this eldritch force that's behind the curse -> city turns to dust -> repeat. not a criticism at all just though it was funny
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