Hataraku Saibou – 02 – This Is Too Much Like School

Well now…the novelty of that wore off quick! The first episode of Cells At Work was a fun romp in the spirit of Magic School Bus or Where’s Waldo (or some show I haven’t watched that’s it’s more like than either of those). But not long into the second episode I…I just couldn’t. A voice-over re-introduces the characters and their function, as if they didn’t just do that last week, and other than that, everything’s too…straightforward.

There’s not much of any clever wit to anything. Everything happens the way you expect: when the skin (city) endures a scrape (fissure), it starts bleeding (flushing the people-cells out into the void outside). The platelets only encourage questions like “will they ever grow up?” or “why is child labor cute?” And of course, the red blood cell protagonist is lost again, because she apparently always is.

Hataraku Saibou isn’t bad, nor is this episode actually that much worse than the first. It’s just hard for me to watch personally. I actually scrubbed through the end of the episode. It’s a show that very genuinely and enthusiastically want to teach you stuff about the body while entertaining you with the hijinks of its characters. But maybe I don’t want to learn, or at least learn like this. It’s just too sincere and twee for me. It’s not you, show, it’s me.