So, as you might've noticed from screenshots and gifs going around on tumblr, Cells at Work is a new anime (and a slightly-less-new-but-still-pretty-recent manga) about the cells of the body and how they function. It wouldn't quite be accurate to say that it's Osmosis Jones the anime, but it wouldn't be an unreasonable comparison either. (It certainly gives a decent reference point, anyways.) I'd say that Cells at Work is a lot more focused on edutainment, though - it's cute and entertaining, but it's also really good at explaining how the body works and how various cells and structures do things (and why!) and the body is portrayed as a whole world that's just trying to get by and survive. The primary protagonist, Red Blood Cell, is shown doing her job (delivering oxygen and nutrients to cells, taking away carbon dioxide and carrying it to the lungs so it can be properly disposed of) and is Hilariously Inept at finding her way around. But she tries really hard and wants to do her best, and her terrible sense of direction allows for giving glimpses at places which are (or will be) plot-important without needing to give an explanation for why she's in the spleen or the lymph nodes. The secondary protagonist is White Blood Cell, whose job is to defend the body from invaders. The white blood cells (and the macrophages, and the t cells) are trying their hardest, but there's a lot of work for them to do! There's a whole additional cast, and the white blood cells seem to be regarded as "helpful but Really Creepy" by a lot of the basic cells so far? But to be fair, the white blood cells are all albinos who dress in white, and charge towards danger screaming about how they're going to kill germs. The cutest so far, though, are the platelets - all of whom have been depicted as schoolkids (maybe kindergarten-aged?), doing their Very Best to perform construction work and repairs around the body.
I've been watching this show while learning anatomy and its a helpful way to reinforce some ideas haha. I really like WBC and hope we see more of RBC too. I'm up to ep 3 and I've been thinking about reading the manga.
Spoiler: Slight negative, tell if i should delete I like the idea but my issue is... And it might not actually be an issue in the show, I haven't seen much... But the world needs to be alive. If WBC and RBC are humans, then the epithelial cells that make up the blood vessels need to be human too. Everything surrounding them should either be human or supporting material or stuff from outside the body. Like they shouldn't be walking around a town, they should be shuttling along a tunnel made of their compatriots.
Most of the cells that get to be characters are cells that move around the body, or at least take actions more interesting than “expand and contract to move the muscle”, and everything else is infrastructure. A lot of the world is made up of apartment blocks inhabited by “common cells” who don’t move around very much. And there is that one time that Spoiler the two main characters get roped into being part of a scab by a bunch of platelets and have to sit over an abrasion in a giant pile of their fellow blood cells for three days But on the whole, I try to think of the whole thing as a metaphorical representation of events, because otherwise our protagonists would die and get replaced every couple of months, and WBC would have to kill every enemy by voring it
Yeah, it works best if you view it as a metaphorical representation of events, with the way things are depicted being subject to change depending on what the manga/show is trying to get across. (Although it is consistent in how it shows things.) "Common cells" don't move around much, so they get plain t-shirts with 'cell' on them and are mostly shown as crowd filler or as reacting to events - they're around and they're part of the world, but they're not who we're following. Showing the world as being literally built out of cells would be more accurate, sure - but it'd also be a lot harder to understand, and one of the goals of the manga and the show is to make it easier to understand how the body works.
I’m reading the manga, by the way, and it’s just as good as the anime. The cancer cell chapter gets surprisingly philosophical.
Hey did yall know that there's a spinoff manga called cells at work: black? It's set in the body of an unhealthy person. I haven't read it yet but apparently This One Has Jizz
Spoiler: minor Black spoilers Update: I have now read it and can confirm that it contains Jizz, and that the sperm cells look really weird, like actual sperm cells but with heads coming out of the top like: o ( O )~~ also I guess the author decided that since this one is r-rated anyway he might as well go all out, so the white blood cells all have giant tiddies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Spotted at my university (in the molecular biology department... I'm assuming someone studies cancer and/or the immune system)
