It¡¯s hard to tune out the news at the moment, but ¡°Cells at Work!¡± offers a temporary balm. Hideki Takeuchi¡¯s film depicts a thriving society in which everyone has a valuable role to play and cooperation is the key to keeping malign forces at bay. Granted, this inspirational drama plays out inside a human body rather than the body politic, but I¡¯ll take whatever I can get right now.
It¡¯s based on a manga series by Akane Shimizu, first published in 2015, which explains the wonders of physiology using anthropomorphized characters. Chief among these are a plucky red blood cell known simply as AE3803 (Mei Nagano) and her platonic buddy and protector, white blood cell U-1146 (Takeru Satoh).
While AE3803 spends her days transporting crates of oxygen in the manner of a takky¨±bin delivery worker, U-1146 is constantly on the hunt for pathogens, which he dispatches with a hunting knife and gravity-defying acrobatics. They¡¯re just two of the trillions of cells populating the body of Niko (Mana Ashida), a high school student who lives with her slobby dad, Shigeru (Sadao Abe).
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