February 6, 2025
AE3803 (Mei Nagano) is a newly-commissioned Red Blood Cell, whose duty was to carry oxygen from the lungs to bring to different parts of the body. Since she was still a newbie, she still had difficulty following the complex map around the blood vessels of the body, and frequently got lost in her delivery routes. Fortunately, a White Blood Cell Neutrophil U-1146 (Takeru Satoh) was always around to defend her from potential harm.
AE3803 and U-1146 were blood cells in the body of Niko Urushizaki (Mana Ashida), a high school student who was planning to take up medicine in the future. She had a crush on a senior student Shin (Seishirô Katô). Since her mother passed away since she was a child, she had been taking care of her father Shigeru (Sadao Abe), a truck driver who was careless with his diet and his vices, like drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes.
"Cells at Work" was originally a manga series written and illustrated by Akane Shimizu which ran from 2015 to 2021. It was then adapted into an anime series with two seasons (21 episodes) which ran from 2018 to 2021. This anime series is currently streaming on Netflix Philippines now. It had a spinoff manga and anime series called "Cells at Work: Code Black," whose storyline was also incorporated in this live action movie version.
Viewers with a background in the health and medical sciences will enjoy watching the blood cells they learned about in their hematology lectures come to vibrant life in this movie. Aside from the RBC and the neutrophil WBC, we also meet Macrophage (Wakana Matsumoto), Helper T-cell (Shôta Sometani), Killer T-Cell (Wataru Ichinose), Natural Killer Cell (Riisa Naka), and all those cute delightful little girls representing the Platelets.
With these blood cells, we see how the pathophysiology of how the body sneezes, repairs wounds, responds to radio- and chemo- therapy, etc. We also see how our body defenses fight their bacterial enemies, like Streptococcus pyogenes (Shinya Niiro), Staphylococcus aureus (Maju Ozawa), and Pneumococcus (Ainosuke Kataoka). There were also more calamitous situations caused by viruses and by abnormal WBCs with maturation arrest.
The segment with the most darkly comic tension was that one when Shigeru suddenly felt the urge to go to the toilet while driving. Practically everyone has had this very uncomfortable situation happen to them in real life, so watching this whole scenario unfold onscreen from the point of view of Shigeru in traffic, the cells in the anal sphincter, the RBC caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and even the corn kernels he just ate, was such a hilarious riot.
"Cells at Work" was not only fun to watch, but at the same time, it was educational as it described key bodily processes in the most imaginative ways. Charismatic lead actors Nagano and Satoh (the lead actor in "Ruoroni Kenshin") captured their animated characters to a T. Adding Ashida and Abe as the persons in whom the cells resided was a great idea, as it gave this film a more heart-warming and emotionally-richer dimension. 8/10
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