Very nice premiere here! This show turned out to be everything I was expecting from its quick pace, casual comedy and a bit of an educational flair. Hataraku Saibou takes place inside the human body and follows the different activities that different types of cells and entities within the body operate, but it’s done with a few modern and real life-inspired twists that make it more fun, relatable and easier to understand.
In this episode we meet and follow a Red Blood Cell who is doing oxygen delivery when suddenly a group of streptococcus germs attack the area, terrorizing the bystanders. They start being annihilated right away by White Blood Cells though and one of them helps save the Red Blood Cell from before. The character designs are very memorable and nice and even the cells that are supposed to be of the same type have some individual traits from character to character! I appreciated that a lot.
Later on, Red Blood Cell MC is walking around trying to make her way to the lungs when she runs into the germ again and she gets some help from White Blood Cell again who takes her to the lungs while they look for the germ. There they find out that the germ has been inside the box the girl is trying to deliver and after some fighting, they trick the germ into coming to an area where it is entrapped and expulsed from the body through a sneeze.
In terms of events not a lot seems to happen in the episode and I’m sort of suspecting that, as the description of the show seems more process related than goal-oriented, the show might be one of those monster of the week type of shows but with a focus on different types of germs and cells. 
I don’t mind those kinds of shows, they can be pretty enjoyable, but I feel like I’d have trouble writing about them if the storylines are not more dense.
The true great point of this anime in my opinion is the world building! The settings are pretty creative in design and the way some of the processes were translated into an easier to understand version for the viewer is wonderful. I like the educational aspect with a narrator explaining more detailed elements of the processes of the body in more scientific terms, too. They did a very good job at introducing many characters in a way that felt natural to the episode, so props on that!
I really enjoyed the first episode, but it doesn’t seem the kind of show that I’d give a lot of priority to weekly, so for the time being, I’d prefer to hold off on claiming it.
Possibility of blogging: Very low
Possibility of watching: Moderate
Based on the manga series of the same name, now available in English.
https://kodanshacomics.com/series/cells-at-work/
There are…scans around, if you know where to look. 🙂
Indeed 😉 It’s pretty cool it got translated into English!
It’s also available as paperback and kindle form on Amazon.
The show is pretty fun, especially for people with a biology related background. But having read the manga, besides RBC-chan getting lost all the time and bumping into WBC, there is no central story line. I think this is one of those shows where you can miss an episode or two and it doesn’t matter, because it’s all episodic stories.
Yeah! i actually checked it out to see if I could recommend it to a friend of mine who studies Biology.
The show does strike as the episodic kind, so that’s why I thought it’d be more difficult to cover it, as it becomes mostly an exercise at summarizing. I would rather just watching casually.