Let’s Face It: Junji Ito’s Anime Should Have Stayed as Manga

It’s frustrating when the adaptation of a masterclass piece of fiction fails to live up to the expectations of fans. While this feeling of disappointment is a common occurrence in every form of media, there’s something especially sad about the disheartening state of Junji Ito’s series of anime adaptations. While the recent failure of Adult Swim’s Uzumaki has been devastating for anime fans, this isn’t the first time the horror manga-making icon’s fans have been left with their hopes crushed. There have been a few attempts now at trying to properly bring Ito’s gorgeous and macabre manga to life, once in 2018 with the Junji Ito Collection, and again in 2023 with Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre, but none of them have been able to properly live up to the mangaka’s legacy.

The worst part of the continued failings of Junji Ito’s anime adaptations is that, in many ways, Ito’s work suffers the same curse as Kentaro Miura’s Berserk – it’s seemingly impossible to get right by animation studios. That’s not to say they don’t try to do right by fans, though. The previously mentioned Uzumaki adaptation from Adult Swim had an absolutely stunning first episode before falling apart in subsequent entries, and the show’s aesthetic proved that the team behind it had a deep love for the source material. 

Attempts at Animating Ito’s Work Misunderstand What Makes His Manga So Horrifying

While it would be easy to simply point the finger and place all the blame on Junji Ito’s various anime adaptations on poor animation quality, the problem, unfortunately, runs much deeper. Starting with the 2018 Junji Ito Collection, which adapted a wide variety of some of Ito’s most famous works – including stories like “The Long Dream”, “Slug Girl”, and “Greased” – failed to understand which aspects of the author’s works are actually scary. While the animation itself is unforgivably flat, the worst part of Junji Ito Collection is that it doesn’t do anything interesting with the subtleties found in Ito’s intricate paneling that build up to those iconic page-turning moments he’s so well known for. 

For example, in the episode “The Long Dream”, the manga does an excellent job building up a grungy, almost grotesque atmosphere around the man trying to navigate his troubled dream cycle. The panels slowly revealing the changes the victim’s body is going through are filled with intricate texture and line work that’s truly capable of making a reader’s skin crawl. Comparing that visceral, haunting display of body horror to what Studio Deen gave to fans in the anime, it’s almost scary how different they are. Instead of using the show’s limited frames to hone in on the texture present in the original series or by building up the atmosphere leading up to the climactic reveal, the show tries its best to do a direct, frame-by-frame recreation of the panels from the manga without trying to add any of that otherworldly, uncanny terror that made the original story so special for manga readers. 

The 2023 collection from Netflix fails in many of the same ways, having extremely flat art direction and adapting Ito’s art style by using muddy, muted greens and browns as opposed to working with his signature monochrome palette. While Netflix’s collection does make an effort to make the show feel more like a proper anime adaptation as opposed to still image replications of popular panels, the overuse of CGI in Junji Ito Maniac sticks out from the atmosphere the showrunners tried to build, breaking up any possible tension that they were working to build up.

Additionally, Junji Ito Maniac’s score fails to add anything to the stories being told, and the opening and ending sequences, while they are excellent tracks on their own, feeling completely out of place in the macabre world of Junji Ito – ultimately leaving the collection feeling lackluster and forgettable. Another aspect of Junji Ito Maniac that hurt the series is that it opens the anime with a first episode that feels more like a kooky horror comedy by adapting “The Strange Hikizuri Siblings: The Seance”, which fails to set the proper tone for subsequent stories that are far more terrifying.

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Uzumaki Fumbled the Last Hopes Fans Had For a Proper Junji Ito Anime

Announced in 2019, the anime adaptation of Uzumaki finally gave fans hope for an animated series based on one of – if not the most – iconic stories Ito had ever written. With a tighter narrative and not having to juggle adapting an anthology of stories, it would give the studio in charge a chance to hone in on what makes Uzumaki so timeless, and to finally do right by Ito’s fans.

Even with only 4 episodes, fans hoped that the smaller scale would allow for the project’s budget to be spent making whatever they adapted stunning. In 2020, when the project was originally meant to release, the production team began teasing storyboards for episodes and casting announcements, but the series ended up being delayed. In 2021, the team made a public statement stating that they would have to restructure the project from scratch, which, unfortunately, didn’t bode well for the anime’s future.

When the anime finally released in October 2024, Ito fans around the globe breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing the first episode. It was absolutely stunning – replicating the monochrome palettes that make Ito’s work so iconic, and beautifully adapting his art style and sketchy line work in the show’s more horrific moments in a way that truly brought Uzumaki to life. Tragically, when the rest of the series aired, the anime took a noticeable dip in quality and ended up succumbing to the same curse as its predecessors. The limited episodes also suffocated the pacing of the story, with its attempt at tying together a story with 19 chapters ultimately dismantling every ounce of tension the first episode had successfully built.

While it is an absolute tragedy that Ito’s work has failed to be translated over to an animated medium so many times – it is worth commending the team who worked on Uzumaki for having the passion to, at the very least, trying to make something that would live up to the expectations of Ito’s fans. Whether another studio will try to pick up and adapt one of the author’s works is uncertain, but hopefully, studios will continue to learn from the mistakes made by previous works, and fans will finally get something that lives up to Junji Ito’s legacy.