Tesla Note is a new anime that premiered on October 3rd this year. It is now available for streaming on Funimation and it caught my eye. The premise of the series is that just before his death, inventor Nikola Tesla sealed his inventions away in a series of “Shards of Tesla” until the world was ready for them. The shards, however, have started going haywire, so a team is put together to try and recover the shards before they do serious damage. I have enjoyed a number of American series based on similar ideas, such as Warehouse 13, The Librarians, and Eureka, so this series sounded pretty interesting to me.
Unfortunately, I don’t find Tesla Note to have the same charm as those other series. I don’t really find myself drawn to either of the main characters. One, Botan, is a high school girl who has been trained her whole life to be a ninja. She is highly skilled and can do just about anything, but is slightly socially awkward due to having to keep her distance from her peers on account of being a ninja. The other, Kuruma, is an experienced field agent who is loud, brash, and annoying. While they both have a small moment at the end of the second episode where Kuruma has to be sincere and help talk Botan through a bout of fear in the field, they just don’t really speak to me as characters yet. I find myself more interested in the team lead, Kyouhei, and information/technology man, Ryunosuke, which isn’t great because there isn’t much to their characters yet either.
Another major drawback or the series is the animation. It is primarily done in a 3d cell shaded style. I don’t personally like that style of animation, but I could live with it if everything else was good. Unfortunately, it isn’t that well executed. Some of the movement is awkward and seems stiff. Additionally, they choose to randomly mix in a few elements that look more like a traditional animation style, but there doesn’t seem a particular logic behind when these elements are included. Overall, then, the animation ends up looking like a cheap video game in a lot of places, with some very jarring out of place drawings included.
I may come back to this series in a couple of weeks once a few more episodes are released. I really do believe that you have to give most anime series 5 episodes before you judge them. This caught my eye and was brand new, though, so I wanted to cover it while it was still early on in the run. I don’t have high hopes for the series, though, and if something else catches my eye, I may not bother to watch any more of it.
Big River Anime Reviews 