Cells at Work | After five episodes (Netflix)

I found a quirky anime that deals with topics about human anatomy and how its blood cells (white and red) work together with the rest of the bodily functions to keep the human body healthy.

That anime is named Cells at Work. It’s not new, it came out in 2018, but Netflix recommended it to me, so I gave it a try.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but by episode five, I figured I could take a break. Having made that break, I wanted to reflect on my first impressions about this anime.

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, it’s a quirky piece of work. Your main character, Red cell, and White cell cross paths, frequently out of the millions and millions of blood cells that work in the body. And the anime shows you that there are other blood cells. It just so happens that this particular White Blood Cell has impeccable timing. The Red Blood Cell is a bit clumsy and always finds herself smack dab in the middle of a crisis. She ends up being saved by the aforementioned White Blood Cell.

Because I’m conditioned to assume a love interest is imminent, I thought right away that the Red Cell and the White Cell would fall in love in some way, but I have no evidence of that as of episode five. They just run into each other a lot in the body during times of disaster.

Something else that I noticed is that all of the red blood cells are female, and the white blood cells are male in this anime. Our staring White Blood Cell is ambiguous and all about doing his job to the fullest extent. He’s always focused on fighting off baddies in the body, while our Red Blood Cell attempts to get nutrients to the body but usually gets caught up in some mess.

As I mentioned, White Blood Cell usually has a hand in saving the day, which allows Red Blood Cell to continue to do her job.

I like that anime. It’s one big biology lesson. We find out how the body responds to situations like the flu, allergy season, bacterial infection because of a cut. It’s all very fascinating. And as much as I talked about the dynamic of the Red and White Blood Cell, the show gives you no reason in the first five episodes to think they are anything other than ships passing by each other.

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I am going to keep watching because after scanning the episode details, there are a view subjects that this anime will cover, and I’m intrigued by how the body works together to defeat them. It’s nice to think of your blood cells as people with intentions of keeping you healthy.

And that’s why I’ll keep watching.