Uzumaki (film)

| cinematography = Gen Kobayashi

| editing =

| studio = Omega Micott Ito had stated that for most of his stories, he starts with a visual image and builds a story around the picture. For Uzumaki, he had a different inspiration of wanting to make a manga about people who lived in a traditional Japanese row-house and seeing what happened. When drawing the row-houses, he found himself drawing a very long house that coiled into a spiral to fit on his page.

The film was the debut feature for director Akihiro Higuchi, under his alias of Higuchinsky. While filming the television series Eko Eko Azarak, director Higuchinsky met Kengo Kaji, to whom he proposed the idea of making a film. Higuchinsky stated that he originally wanted to make a film like Star Wars but realized that "because I'm Japanese, I should do something different."

Higuchinsky had been reading a manga magazine compilation which contained Ito's Uzumaki. Higuchinsky thought the manga was brilliant and asked Kengo Kaji to adapt the film, finding out that the manga was already in the process of being made into a film and that producers were looking for a director. Higuchinsky described the lure of Uzumaki using the Japanese word kikai, which translates to "strange and mysterious things (or people)", and that "the allure of Uzumaki is not that the uzumaki itself is scary but rather the changes in the people caught up in it. " The original production of the film was going to be an independent production and would be part of an anthology film, but during production, Toei Animation decided to have it become a bigger film. The film was backed by Toyoyuki Yokohama's Omega Project, a company that married Japanese and foreign funding to make J-horror films for an international market. The company had previously had success with the 1999 film Audition.

Production

Higuchinsky desired to be faithful to the manga as possible. At the time, the manga had not been completed yet.

To help his crew express a Japanese style in the film, he had his staff watch Akuma no temari uta. The film was primarily shot in Ueda, Nagano Prefecture, with a few locations in Tokyo. Higuchinsky said the film was shot in about two weeks.

Promotion and release

Uzumaki was released in Japan on 11 February 2000. It was released as the first half of a double bill with Tomie: Replay, a film based on the manga Tomie, also by Ito. The film was released concurrently in the United States as it was in Japan with a limited run in San Francisco. Omega's vice-president Akiko Funatsu stated that San Francisco was chosen due to "all the internet activity there". Based on grosses from Japan's nine key cities, the films opened in 14th place for the week.

The film was shown at the 2000 Fantasia Film Festival.

Reception

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 61% based on 28 reviews, with an average rating of 6.30/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "Uzumaki uses its creepy, David Lynch-inspired atmospherics to effectively build a sense of dread, but ultimately fails to do anything with it." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 62 out of 100 based on nine critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

In his review of the film for The New York Times, critic Elvis Mitchell noted the way the film develops mood, finding it part of the cycle of Japanese films like Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure and Hideo Nakata's Ring as "vivid, state-of-the-art scare films that move so swiftly that psychological underpinnings are a luxury".

Ross Williams of Film Threat praised the film's sound design and "cheesy, yet at the same time impressive and effective" special effects, writing: "While not as effectively creepy as The Ring, [Uzumaki] undoubtedly deserves to be watched". Scott Tobias of The A.V. Club noted the style of the film, opining that "Higuchinsky's restlessly kinetic shooting style doesn't pause for anything; like a lot of music-video and commercial directors, his achievement is better considered shot-by-shot than as a whole." AllMovie's Josh Ralske gave the film a score of three-and-a-half stars out of five, calling it "visually imaginative and engagingly offbeat horror film, but its willful goofiness and unresolved story line doesn't offer much in the way of psychological resonance."

Higuchinsky stated that, since the film's release, he has received fan mail from Europe, which made him particularly happy as it was his "dream to use film as a way to overcome national borders and have my movies watched by people all over the world. I think that these fans focus not on the story but on the simple images, they sense something through the visuals."

References

Bibliography

External links

ja:うずまき (漫画)