Let’s Celebrate Anime Anthropomorphism with ‘Cells at Work’!

Assigning human characteristics and agency to non-human objects is known as anthropomorphism, and in the context of anime and Japan, it’s been one of the defining trends of the past two decades. Today everything from WWII mecha and warships to military weapons is part of this genre of moe-ification… even the cells inside our bodies, thanks to the Cells at Work! anime series. Let’s take a look at the history of this tradition of “anime anthropomorphism” and see where it comes from.

• It all started, I believe, with the creation of OS-tan, fans creating characters that represent the various Microsoft OSes. At its height, there were semi-official anime characters for Windows 10 and the company’s Azure cloud platform. (The –tan suffix mimics the way a child would pronounce -chan, making it sound extra cute.)
• When illustrator Fumikane Shimada got the idea to meld WWII mecha with cute anime girls for Konami’s line of “mecha musume” figures, he set off a massive trend that would lead to cute anime characters based on famous heroes of WWII (Strike Witches), the warships of the era (Kantai Collection, Azur Lane), military assault rifles (Upotte!), and so on.
• Touken Ranbu, in which the famous swords of Japanese history are given life as handsome bishie characters fans can do battle with. I notice that this browser game is getting an English translation under the hilarious title Swordboys.
• Nationalities themselves can become anthropomorphized, for example in the Hetalia series, with each character representing some of the unique personality quirks associated with each nation.
• Making cute humanoid representations has even spilled outside the anime-related world, for example when everyone started making fanart of Earth-chan.

The Cells at Work Anime Returns!

We’ve got a ridiculous number of top-quality series to watch, so many that it is almost like real work keeping up with them all. One show I’ve been enjoying is the second season of Cells at Work! (Hataraku Saibou), which lets us see how hard the cells in our body work, with red blood cells delivering oxygen to our vital regions, white blood cells attacking invading bacteria, platelets going into action whenever the surface of the skin is cut, and so on. All our friends are back in this new season, including Red Cell AE3803 (voiced by fan-favorite Hana Kanazawa), the hardworking White Cell U-1146, the adorable Platelet-chan, and more.

While Cells at Work is a fun slice-of-life show about characters representing our cells doing their jobs every day, it’s also great because it teaches us how the cells in our bodies work. The series has been widely praised by experts for its medical accuracy and potential to raise awareness about the various factors that affect our internal health.

While it’s great to have a 2nd season of #CellsAtWork, the series I’m really enjoying is #CellsAtWorkBLACK, the story of cells inside a stressed male body that doesn’t take proper care of itself.

The scene where the red blood cells work hard to enable an erection was legendary! pic.twitter.com/vOXMuNt1fH

— Peter Payne (@JListPeter) February 5, 2021

The Series I Prefer is Hataraku Saibou BLACK

While it’s nice to relax with the second season of the original show, I think I’m enjoying the alternate series Cells at Work! BLACK even more. It’s the story of the cells working inside a stressed-out male body that doesn’t take proper care of itself, and the extra problems this causes for the cells, who must deliver oxygen to dangerous parts of the body, endure poisons flowing into the body when their owner smokes cigarettes, become disoriented when he drinks alcohol, and so on. It’s all fun to see how the cells react to each new unhealthy situation that’s thrown at them, but also something healthy to reflect on, too.

One of the themes of Cells at Work! BLACK is the working conditions the cells face in their unhealthy host. This is a reference to burakku kigyou, the “black companies” in Japan that sometimes abuse their workers, expecting them to work unpaid overtime and generally not being supportive of their well-being. The idea is that when we abuse our bodies with alcohol or tobacco if we let ourselves get over-stressed, we’re like the owners of these evil companies, not caring about the cells who are working so hard to keep us alive.

The scene where the cells’ host body has sex is pure genius. Every aspect of what happens when a male gets aroused is explained, right down to how the blood flows into the hard-to-access regions of the penis to the mechanisms at work when erectile dysfunction occurs, and even what happens chemically when a man takes Viagra to get the job done, with the cells observing it all first-hand. It’s incredibly entertaining to watch, and also educational!

But why would the cells in our body work so hard just so that the body could get an erection and have sex? As White Cell U-1196 puts it, “If it’s to protect a new life, then risking your own isn’t such a bad thing.”

Thanks for reading this blog post about Cells at Work! and Cells at Work BLACK. We hope you’ll give both series a try!