Review: Heaven's Design Team (Anime TV)

Cross-posted from !animationafter30

Original post: lemmy.world/post/14555726

Title: Heaven’s Design Team (original: 天地創造デザイン部)

Type: Anime TV

Year: 2021

Country: Japan

Genre: Comedy/Educational

Status: Completed

Platform: Crunchyroll (watch here)

Appropriate for 30+?: Yes

My rating: 4/5 stars

(Rating scale: 5/5 = masterpiece, 4/5 = quite good, 3/5 = mostly good, 2/5 = bleh, 1/5 = I regret ever being exposed to this series, 0/5 = affront to humanity)

The greatest irony of Heaven’s Design Team is that a series about creationism is actually one of the best science anime out there (not that there’s a lot of competition). While some elements of the show would undoubtedly make many biologists squirm (for instance, the show’s premise inevitably leads the series to portray evolution as intentional rather than incidental), however if you’re willing to brush off certain scientific inaccuracies as a consequence of artistic liberty, this is a really fun, mildly-educational show.

The premise of Heaven’s Design Team is simple: God burned out when having to create Earth and everything that lives there, so He outsourced the work to a team of designers (the main cast). Most episodes revolve around the design team receiving a specific request from God for a new animal (like “an animal with bones as weapons” or “make more stripey animals”) and then they walk through different possible ideas and why that would/would not work given physiological limits and environmental pressures. It becomes a bit of a puzzle show: can the viewer guess what real-world animal the design team is building up to? (Or for the more obscure animals: have you even heard of this species before?) Between the brainstorming and trial-and-error, there’s a lot of failed designs along the way to a design that God deems “accepted,” and IMO the most interesting part of the show is when they go into why certain designs failed and the tweaks necessary to get around it (for example: bigger eyes means better eyesight, but then the eyeballs take up so much room in the skull there’s no room for the musculature necessary to move them, so the design team extends the animal’s neck so it moves its head rather than its eyeballs).

The show has very little objectionable material in it (a PG-rating at worst), and the deluge of “fun facts about animals” is reminiscent of kid-oriented nature shows (like Wild Kratts), however I think Heaven’s Design Team has plenty of entertainment value for adults too. I consider myself quite well-educated on animals for a layperson, but most of the facts and many of the animals I had never heard about before, so there were plenty of surprises and much trivia learned. There’s also a good dose of (G-rated) adult-oriented humor, mostly of the office workplace variety. Mostly though I think older audiences will appreciate the series’s solid execution: the animation is bold and colorful, the dialogue is decent, the pacing is snappy (exceptionally so for a comedy anime), and the humor is on the gag side but the jokes usually land. While the characters are extremely two-dimensional and undergo minimal character development, that actually works in the show’s favor, as it gives each animal designer a “style” that influences the creatures they create (whether they’re more likely to come out cute, creepy, delicious, etc). While some topics of humor are used multiple times (e.g. “Tsuchiya/Saturn is obsessed with making everything into a horse!”) on each occasion the reused humor was always presented with a fresh spin and never wore out over the series’s 13 episode run (sadly rehashing the same tired joke over and over is par for the course in comedy anime, so this is impressive). I think the series goes a little off the rails at times in the last few episodes and gets extra goofy (although bonus episode 13 brings the series back to its roots), but even the weaker segments of the series are still very watchable.

As always, this review is nothing more than my personal opinion. Anyone familiar with this work is encouraged to express their own in the comment section. Or submit your own review… it’s a free country fediverse.