Thunder 3

Episodes 1-3

I'm quite confident in announcing that this is most definitely the Summer 2026 anime season's strangest isekai, and I worry that it may not find an audience as a result. The art style, especially in Thunder 3's opening minutes, is certainly off-putting to those raised on a diet of Jujutsu Kaisen and Demon Slayer. I've been looking forward to this adaptation ever since I read the manga ages back, and while the first episode's delayed implementation of the central premise is indeed genius, it may work against viewers with short attention spans, their eyeballs distracted by so many other more immediately attractive shows.

Thunder 3 is worth sticking with, through the cutesy prologue set in an unusually cartoony (even for anime) world where little blob person Pyontaro lives with his family and cute-as-a-button little sister Futaba. Pyontaro is obsessed with boobs, while one of his two schoolfriends has an underpants fixation. They live a normal schoolkid life, with normal schoolkid concerns, with Pyontaro's main complaints involving having to share a bed with Futaba, who's prone to wetting herself overnight.

Even in this seemingly sedate prologue, there's something clearly not quite right. Their teacher, “Doc,” gives lectures about parallel worlds, and then orders a DVD off the internet that apparently grants access to said worlds. Obviously, he entrusts this cosmology-rewriting object to his students without thinking of the consequences—said consequence being that when running the disc on Pyontaro's “TS5,” it transforms the living room TV screen into a portal to another dimension, through which li'l Futaba wanders.

The world Futaba discovers is much more like the “real” world, though the people, despite being more realistically proportioned than those in the “cartoon” world, are still animated using very rudimentary and fairly ugly CG. This place has enormous CG alien spaceships hovering in the sky, which freak Futaba out almost as much as the people crowding around her, staring at the “manga character.” I don't blame them; she's surrounded by a haze of dots like screentone.

At this point, the opening credits decide to run, about two-thirds through the episode. Anyone who stops watching there has been trolled. For one, the opening animated sequence completely spoils the premise of the show – this is Gantz but with funny cartoon people mixed in. We see a whole bunch of formidable-looking people in Gantz-like battle outfits ready to kick alien butt.

The post-opening sequence segment shows us tiny little toddler Futaba terrifying the invading aliens so much that they launch several enormous ballistic missiles at her. That's not something you see every day, even in anime. When Pyontaro and pals also step into the TV world, they discover they're superpowered in comparison to everyone in this flimsy world where solid rock crumbles beneath their fingers. So begins their quest to retrieve Futaba from the aliens, and then the ending sequence begins. It's such a weirdly structured episode, but it adapts the entire first chapter of the manga extremely closely.

Episode two poses the question: how would you react upon answering the door to another version of yourself, who claims to have travelled from a parallel universe? You'd have questions, wouldn't you? Especially if this version of you looks squished down and chibified, with a comparatively enormous head and roughly-drawn features? The “real world” version of Pyontaro and his family seem to have no such deep requirement for answers. Other than laughing about the absurdity of the entire situation, they allow Pyontaro and his dog into their house, while the doppelganger families of Pyontaro's friends do much the same for them. Perhaps living in a world now colonized by 3-meter-tall aliens and witnessing their enormous ships hovering menacingly in the air every day tends to dull the surprise factor of the remarkable. Or perhaps the parental instinct is just that strong.

Before seeking out their doppelganger families, though, the Small Three are disturbed to find their portal back to their own world has been closed (by Pyontaro's dad ejecting the disc from his console). It's a scary prospect, being trapped in a strange world where you have no food, your money doesn't work, and everyone looks at you funny. The boys' plan to secure funds for a train fare is hilarious – they take to the streets to sing for their supper, possibly inspired by the guitar-playing girl whose counterpart they meet here is just as dismissive of them as her cartoony version. Regardless, they're such a novelty, the coins come rolling in.

This world does have its upside for the boys. The most joyfully fun part of the episode is the sequence where they test the limits of their new abilities. With bodies so resilient that the Earth around them is as comparatively insubstantial as cake, they can jump hundreds of meters into the air, rip up the road surface merely from running (at supersonic speed), and even fire some kind of projectile energy beams. They're like Superman, aliens in a foreign world, blessed with such incredible power that they must be careful not to hurt innocent people.

The situation with the real aliens is even stranger. Five months ago they turned up in the skies above Earth, claimed to come in peace, and since then they've integrated… sort of… into human society. Hovering buses bring these towering bipedal creatures back and forth from the floating ships, and they randomly wander around the cities. Oddly, they don't seem to interact with humans at all, completely ignoring them. It's kind of eerie, and a bit rude. This world's version of Pyontaro blames them for food store shelves being empty, but we don't know for sure if this is true. People seem to have accepted the aliens' existence, including their claims of peace, despite the fact their ships are armed with enormous guns, and they've begun to move military hardware onto the ground. This doesn't look great for humanity's future.

Pyontaro's more worried about his sister's future, and triggered by her more realistic counterpart and her identical relationship with her own brother, he pines for the missing Futaba. Futaba herself seems fairly unperturbed, considering her situation, sitting on a medical examination couch, about to have her brain dissected by a whining drill. It's such a bizarre tonal disconnect seeing the alien scientists talk about dissecting her brain, and then seeing this little cartoon toddler sitting there nonchalantly—as we know this tiny little blob person has the power to tear everything around her apart like cardboard effortlessly.

Between them, episodes two and three adapt the remainder of the first manga volume, and a little of the second, maintaining a reasonable pace that unfortunately flags in the third episode. We return to little Futaba, still sitting on the examination couch as the aliens' scary laser drill things completely fail to break the surface of her skin. The aliens become more and more disturbed by this tiny little girl, as she effortlessly smashes through walls, all the while calling plaintively for her big brother, her pet dog, and her mother. Futaba doesn't care that she's surrounded by aliens who want to drill open her brain; she just wants to go home. She's a normal toddler, one who just happens to wield the power of a god. I almost feel sorry for the poor alien dudes, as they'll never survive if she has a temper tantrum.

Even the aliens' new experimental heat gun thingies, powerful enough to roast a towering monster, are no match for Futaba. Unleashing the power of flame at maximum potential does little but cover her in surface char that she's easily able to smash out of. Run, puny aliens. The Toddler Cometh.

Back down on the surface, the Small Three prevaricate about how to locate Futaba. As schoolkids, they're essentially conditioned to seek advice from authority figures like parents, or teachers, or police officers. As we're shown, none of these options are of any use to them. It takes prompting from their own doppelgangers to come to a completely obvious conclusion – go rescue her themselves. If the aliens truly are in control of the government and the police, as seems likely from the ice cream incident and the alien father and child's entitled and overblown reaction to a human family's resistance to their bullying, then the Small Three can't rely on anyone other than themselves.

The pacing of the third episode seems a little off, probably because of the protagonists being so slow on the uptake, but when they finally decide to take matters into their own hands, the results are gloriously daft. I almost felt sorry for the poor alien soldier guy spun around at breakneck speed before being launched apparently into orbit. Of course, this is after he manages to mortally wound his colleague in his panic, catching him in the crossfire when he sprays the Small Three with lethal smoke-producing projectiles. There's some brutal violence here, mixed in with the goofiness, the aforementioned tonal disconnect being the show's main calling card.

That tonal disconnect is at the heart of why this show is so entertaining and silly. Hopefully that will be enough to keep viewers returning, because the visuals are genuinely awful. Apart from the awesome-looking ships and mechs, everything else, especially the “real” CG humans, looks stiff and awkward. They're not quite at EX-ARM level of offensive ugliness, but they're close, especially their horrifying mouths. I can forgive the very rudimentary CG for the Small Three as a certain uncanny valley effect is actually beneficial for their fundamental concept. Still, I wish the “real” people looked and moved less like dolls with minimal points of articulation. I find it unbelievable that such poor CG modelling makes it into professional productions in the year 2026, when the anime industry has had multiple decades to sort this kind of shit out.

I can understand anyone bouncing off Thunder 3 when judging it purely by its frankly ugly appearance. As a manga reader, I can confidently say that this shit gets absolutely wild, and I'm excited to see how it transfers to the screen.

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Thunder 3 is currently streaming on Netflix.