In Oslo, Norway, a train falls out of the sky. Cut to Japan, where high school girl Botan returns home only to be attacked by men in black as a test by her grandfather, who raised her to be a ninja. Botan learns that the time has come for “Mission T,” the task of saving the world for which gramps has been prepping her all her life. Oh, also throw in a couple quotes attributed to Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Roll the OP. Now, in a Norwegian airport, a guy named Kuruma trounces a pickpocket to retrieve a woman’s stolen wallet. Secret agent boss guy Himi introduces Kuruma to Botan. Info dump time: Tesla somehow hid a bunch of his inventions in crystals which he scattered around the world. One of said crystals is responsible for the train incident in the prologue. Botan infiltrates the wreckage and finds a mutated survivor hiding in the ceiling (?), but then she’s discovered and flees. Later, while observing a half-melted car in a tree, Kuruma and Botan save an elderly couple from getting isekai’d by Truck-kun (who, like the other vehicular incidents, falls out of the air). The police think they are suspicious and chase them.

Elephant, meet room: this is a very CGI-looking anime, bringing to mind RWBY or video game cutscenes. I know some people hate blatant CGI, so if you’re one of them, don’t watch this show. For anyone more tolerant of a little CGI mixed into their anime a little anime mixed into their CGI, while the art style did distract me a couple times, it didn’t keep me from enjoying the show (perhaps because I’ve been watching RWBY for so long), and at times I’d even say the visuals were quite nice.

Visuals aside, this episode was really fun! I laughed repeatedly at all the silliness, especially the snarky bickering between Kuruma and Botan. I can see them having this cantankerous buddy-cop dynamic. It’s hard to be sure with only one episode, but this could turn out to be a pretty hilarious secret-agent-ninja-sci-fi-comedy-adventure story. I’ll definitely come back for the next episode.

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You can watch Tesla Note on Funimation.

Fall 2021 Anime First Impressions