When I saw the initial premise of Cells at Work I was very intrigued.
The idea of the cells in your body as anime characters running around doing their daily chores was the kind of thing that I was expecting to be a quirky anime title, but I did not foresee how much I would enjoy it at all.
Cells at Work follows the exploits of a red blood cell who keeps trying to do her job of delivering packages of oxygen to the different areas of the body. The problem is she keeps getting lost and winding up in different parts of the body where she keeps finding herself in trouble and having to be saved by the white blood cells. One specific one keeps getting her out of a jam and the two build up a relationship as he destroys the enemies of the body with violent fashion.
What is extraordinary about the show is it doesn’t give the idea that it’s in a body just by its look, with lots of buildings, pathways, and nature around the show looks by all means like a futuristic city and in a sense it is built very much like a classic anime.
The episodic structure and plot by all means feel like it could be any other anime and if you renamed every character and place it would be a decent generic anime show. And yet it is based on some extraordinary levels of biological accuracy which I discovered as I googled a lot as the show went on – for example, I had never heard of Killer T cells, Platelets.