Cells at Work Episode 8: Be Your Best You

Cells at Work hasn’t exactly been subtle in its messaging of hard work, serving the community, and fulfilling your assigned role in life, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been fun. Watching Red Blood Cell struggle to overcome her directionally challenged nature was quite the adorable journey this week and one that I greatly enjoyed.

When Red Blood Cell looks around, she realises that she kind of sucks at her job, and there’s no real counter to that point. If we think about her existence in this anime she has wandered around getting lost, being rescued, and generally clueless. While she is cute and hard working and earnest, she isn’t very good at being a red blood cell. So it is nice that this anime decides to address this in an episode that very much focuses in on her attempt to circulate without assistance.

Of course, assistance is there in the form of White Blood Cell. Now, in any other anime I’d say these two kids were going to end up getting together because White Blood Cell clearly is into Red Blood Cell, but given they are anthropomorphised blood cells that just doesn’t seem likely or plausible, but still adorable. Anyway, White Blood Cell respects that Red wants to do it alone but follows her discreetly clearing the more overt obstacles from her path when necessary but otherwise leaving her to find her own way.

Compared to previous episodes, this one isn’t really action focused (though White does take out a couple of germs along the way). This episode very much focuses on the comedy of Red getting lost and that’s really all there is to it. However, after the last few episodes where it has felt like your body is under continuous attack, it was nice just to have a fairly laid back episode dealing with the body functioning normally (except the part where the blood cell keeps getting lost). I had a great time this week and really enjoyed just spending time watching these characters at work.

That, and we had more platelets this week.