Earlier today, Junji Ito hosted a live drawing panel at Crunchyroll Expo. During the event, Production I.G., LLC President Maki Terashima-Furuta announced that his work Uzumaki will receive an anime adaptation. The title is slated to be a mini-series, which will be co-produced with Adult Swim. Yatta-Tachi editor-in-chief Katy Castillo, who attended the event, reports that the show will air in North America in 2020, ahead of its Japanese premiere.
Hiroshi Nagahama (Mushi-shi, The Flowers of Evil) will direct the project at Production I.G., while Colin Stetson scores the soundtrack.
Adult Swim started streaming a trailer for the project, which you can check out below.
A Twitter account for the project opened its doors shortly afterwards, which contains a logo for the project.
Uzumaki is a three-volume manga, which ran in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Spirits magazine from 1998 through 1999. Since its release, the title has received numerous awards, including a 2003 Eisner Award for “Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material.”
Viz Media holds the rights to Uzumaki, which they describe as:
Kurozu-cho, a small fog-bound town on the coast of Japan, is cursed. According to Shuichi Saito, the withdrawn boyfriend of teenager Kirie Goshima, their town is haunted not by a person or being but by a pattern: uzumaki, the spiral, the hypnotic secret shape of the world.
It manifests itself in everything from seashells and whirlpools in water to the spiral marks on people’s bodies, the insane obsessions of Shuichi’s father and the voice from the cochlea in our inner ear. As the madness spreads, the inhabitants of Kurozu-cho are pulled ever deeper into a whirlpool from which there is no return!
Source: Yatta-Tachi editor-in-chief Katy Castillo, Twitter (Evan Minto)
Update 8/30/2019, 7:57PM Eastern: Updated with studio information; correction on the individual who made the announcement.
