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Review | Cells at Work! movie review: hilarious Japanese comedy gets inside the human body
Actors depict red and white blood cells in Hideki Takeuchi’s laugh-out-loud movie about how the human body battles cancer and loose bowels
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3/5 stars
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Pixar’s Inside Out may have won an Academy Award and spawned a record-breaking sequel, but storytellers have been assigning personalities to our emotions and internal organs for years.
British comic strip The Numskulls first appeared in 1962, while French cartoon Il était une fois … La vie tackled a similar idea in the 80s.
The year 2015 proved to be a banner year for such stories even before Inside Out premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Lee Dong-gun launched his Korean webtoon Yumi’s Cells that spring, which would later inspire a hit K-drama series. Akane Shimizu’s Japanese manga Cells at Work! dropped even earlier.
Something was clearly in the water – or rather the blood, as Shimizu’s story focuses on the exploits of anthropomorphised blood cells inside the body of a young girl.
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Shimizu’s original manga spawned several spin-offs, an anime series, and an animated feature. Now, Thermae Romae director Hideki Takeuchi helms an energetic live-action adaptation bursting with garish costumes, slapstick action, and a healthy transfusion of humour and heartache.
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