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Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim and Toonami programming blocks played a key role in bringing anime into the American mainstream. Now, the network just doesn’t air series stateside, but it’s also produced a fair bit of anime. For instance, Batman-inspired mecha series “The Big O” got a second season in 2003, co-produced by Sunrise and Cartoon Network, because the show was a big hit on Toonami.
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Adult Swim is about to kick-off “Lazarus,” the newest anime from “Cowboy Bebop” director Shinichiro Watanabe. But many anime fans are still reeling from disappointment towards Adult Swim’s last big anime.
That would be 2024’s “Uzumaki,” the four-episode adaptation of Junji Ito’s acclaimed 1998 horror manga. “Uzumaki” is set in Kurouzu-cho, a fictional Japanese coastal town. The town and its people, including our heroine, Kirie Goshima, are cursed, and their torments always manifest as a spiral shape. (“Uzumaki” is Japanese for “Spiral.”)
Co-produced by Production I.G USA and Adult Swim, the series was first announced in 2019 and originally scheduled for a 2020 release date. It was then pushed back to 2021 before being postponed again (COVID-19 reportedly delayed the production by almost a year around this time), with nothing but a 35-second teaser to show for it. Finally, a “first look” clip of the series premiered in July 2023, over a year before the series actually debuted on Toonami in September 2024.
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The delays seemed to all be worth it when the first “Uzumaki” episode proved to be quite good. It was heralded as the first successful attempt at animating Ito’s comic art, leaving many eagerly awaiting the next three episodes. Then came the crushing disappointment where the animation quality plummeted.
The instant and loud backlash to “Uzumaki” episode 2 prompted a response. Jason DeMarco (co-creator of Toonami and creative director at Adult Swim) shared his side of what happened in three now-deleted posts over at BlueSky:
“It’s fine, we knew this would happen. I can’t talk about what went down but we were screwed over and the options were A) not finish and air nothing and call it a loss, B) Just finish and air ep 1 and leave it incomplete or C) run all four, warts and all. Out of respect for the hard work we chose C.”
“After waiting so long, it makes sense people would be mad. Unfortunately I can’t tell them who to blame it on … but someone is definitely at fault here, and we all just had to do our best when things imploded. Maybe others would have made different choices. We did the best we could with what we had.”
“But again, a lot of ppl worked very hard on this show and I didn’t think the actions of just one or two people should be the reason it never saw the light of day. Maybe that’s the wrong choice, I truly don’t know. But those ppl have a right to be annoyed and disappointed. I’m glad you are digging it.”
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Little in the way of additional details have come to light in the six months since DeMarco’s post. That includes the identities of the “one or two people” who allegedly screwed things up.
