Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

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On a fundamental, very basic level, the absolute first thing a work of fiction ever has to do for you as the viewer, is convince you that the world that it exists in could be real. Not consciously, of course, but you have to accept the premise and the production–whatever they may be–on a subconscious level to even begin processing a story as such. That’s what the suspension of disbelief is. It is almost impossible to fail at this step when creating an even remotely professional work of art. And in anime, even very, very bad shows can convey a sense that the worlds they take place in exist in some sense. Even the worst things I’ve covered on this site, your Big Orders, hell, your Speed Graphers, can do that much.

Tesla Note, improbably, fails at this very first step. Even worse, it’s not even the first anime to do so this year, quickly establishing itself as a close cousin of the truly rancid Ex-Arm, which it makes some of the same mistakes as. Though in other ways, while Tesla Note is not quite as consistently awful, it is actually worse in the sheer number of ways it manages to be bad, as we’ll get to.

I’m not going to condescend to my readership by pretending any of you need to know about this thing’s plot. But if you are, for some reason, curious, here’s the official description, in its entirety.

Genius Nikola Tesla preserved records of all his inventions inside crystals known as Tesla Shards. After an inexplicable incident in Norway, Botan Negoro, a descendant of ninjas raised to be the ultimate agent, is recruited on a mission to recover the crystals. Her partner through this is self-proclaimed No. 1 agent, Kuruma. With the fate of the world at stake, the fight for the shards begins.

In practice this doesn’t matter. It’s a setup for garden variety super-spy BS that can absolutely be fun if it’s handled the right way. But folks? This is not the right way. Tesla Note is the first production from the brand-new studio Gambit, and I would not be surprised if it were their last. Surely no one enters the anime industry–hell, cartoons in general–and their desire is to make this? I’m not talking about the animators, who I have the deepest sympathy for. I’m referring to the higher-ups here. What led to this?

“This”, if you’re not picking it up just from the screencaps, is an absolutely eye-searing cornucopia of god-awful 3D CGI. And let me be very clear, I am something of a 3D CG apologist. There have been anime earlier this year that have made great use of 3D CG, one of which, Love Live Superstar!!, is airing this very season. I am not against the process on principle, and used well it can lead to wonderful things that are difficult or impossible to achieve with traditional 2D animation. In some sense, Tesla Note may also have been impossible to achieve if animated traditionally, but certainly not in any good sense.

Visually speaking, Tesla Note’s mix of stiff, under-rigged, poorly-lit, and generally bad-looking models for its main characters, its unconvincing backgrounds, the fever-dream editing style, its flat-out inexplicable decision to animate some but not all minor characters traditionally, and its profound failure to make any of this look like it exists on the same planet, much less in the same show, all combine into a symphony of incompetence. Tesla Note has all the visual panache of a teenager fucking around in GMod or a Virtual Youtuber working out the kinks in her rig before going live for the first time, which is funny, given that the main character is named Botan. It is the worst-looking anime of 2021, exceeding Ex-Arm, its only real competition, by lacking the one thing that show had, a unity of style.

Occasionally, the odd traditionally-animated cut will pop in, just for a moment, almost as a taunt. None of the few examples in this first episode are really any good, but they at least stand out.

Worse; Tesla Note is not merely awful-looking, it is also horribly-written. For nearly the entire 22-minute runtime of the first episode, no one ever shuts up. Almost every single second is filled with the characters chattering away in some of the most uninspired, cliché-ridden character dialogue I have ever seen. I was not super keen on the last series I did for this column, but this makes Selection Project look like The End of Evangelion. It is terminally charmless.

So does this thing have any merit? Well, if you’re the sort who enjoys gazing into the dying dreams of popular media, its first episode has some value as a thing to inflict on the unsuspecting. When it’s over, I could see it being an interesting thing to get wasted and binge watch with a particularly susceptible group of friends. Even then, be wary of falling on the wrong side of the Star Wars Holiday Special graph.

^{Truly there is an xkcd for every situation.}

Other than that? No. Avoid Tesla Note at all costs.

Grade: F-
The Takeaway: Don’t watch this. Seriously, love yourself. Even for those chasing a “so bad it’s good” “meme anime” or what-have-you, the novelty will wear off, and you will be left spiritually hollow by the experience. Self-care is important these days.

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