Cells at Work is originally an ongoing manga series published by Kodansha and written by Akane Shimizu while the anime is licensed by Aniplex and written by Yūko Kakihara and Kenichi Suzuki.
I’ll be honest with you. When I first saw Cells at Work as a title on Crunchyroll, I had no intention of watching it. I made a quick judgment based on the description and thought it would be either another goofy, over-the-top anime or super boring. Then a very close friend of mine, whose opinion of anime I respect, made a comment about how much she liked it and that was enough to make me watch the first episode. I like to think I’m normally pretty good at judging whether or not I’ll like an anime, in this case, I was not, because I was super excited like two minutes into the first episode.
Cells at Work is about your body. Well, the human body, at least, and all the hard-working cells inside it. Within these trillions of cells, we have rookie red blood cell, AE3803 who constantly gets lost trying to make her deliveries and the ever-alert, constantly on the move destroying germs that invade the body, white blood cell, U-1146.
Although these two have different jobs, they find themselves constantly running into each other, especially when there’s danger. In each episode, we meet lots of other cells, like Memory, Macrophage, Eosinophil, Killer T cells, Platelets (arguably the cutest cell in the body), and more. And they are all just fantastic people. It’s kind of like Osmosis Jones, you know, that movie from 2001 where Chris Rock is a beat cop white blood cell? Yeah. But there’s no live action and it’s like…better.
So throughout the season, this guy – at least I think the host body is a male. Mainly because all of the common cells are the only ones that look exactly alike and all look like the same guy, so I assume that’s also what the host looks like – experiences a wide range of issues that humans face, but on a cellular level, everything is WAY more intense. Even what we view as a simple scrape has a ridiculous effect on the cells, shifting their regular, peaceful day into chaos.
Yep, from a little scrape to more complex things like cancer cells, parasites, and viruses, we get to watch these cells do their best to keep the guy healthy and alive. Each time a new cell, germ, or catastrophic event is introduced, the narrator gives us a concise description of what it is. I seriously learned something new in every episode. I’ve retained more from 1 season of this anime than all of the biology classes I’ve ever taken combined. I mean, I know certain things aren’t 100% accurate, like your red blood cells literally encouraging each other or taking breaks to drink tea, but overall, it’s pretty darn accurate.
OVERALL SCORE: 9.5 / 10
It’s a show that is both educational AND entertaining with something interesting happening in pretty much every episode. There are hilarious surprises, some pretty brutal bacteria death, and most importantly, the most adorable romance that needs to happen. Seriously. Let my red blood cell and white blood cell ship sail.
