Review on Heaven’s Design Team

As the current anima season comes to an end, I thought that I would try to write a review on my favorite anime of the season: Heaven’s Design Team/Tenchi Sōzō Dezain-bu. While it probably was overshadowed by other anime series this season, I believe that this show has its own special charm and people should give it a try. But then again, I don’t watch every single anime under the sun so the charm aspect might change depending on perception.

The anime takes place in heaven, where God (instead of creating all the animals himself) has angels come up with designs for animals which will inhabit the earth. The protagonist is an angel called Shimoda who is a new member of the design team. Shimoda’s tasks is to see the animals being designed before God lets him know whether a design is accepted or not. Sometimes animals are designed without God’s order to solve a given problem, such as a giant Hallucigenia rampaging in the engineer’s room. The show focuses on animal adaptations and why mythical animals can't exist on earth. Being a series that show two separate events each episode instead of a story that spans through the entire series, I wouldn’t expect everyone to enjoy the plot of this series. I did like it however (probably because I do enjoy slice of life series.)

Now you might be thinking that this plot with intelligent design, God, and angels might be creationist propaganda. I assure you that this isn’t the case since it is all “biblically accurate”. It also isn’t pushing religion to its audience.

I personally enjoyed the characters. I am not confident when it comes to reviewing characters to see if they are one dimensional or if they are well written. However, I do believe that the designers are easy to remember, and some do have a decent to good chemistry as coworkers. Sadly, I can’t say the same for Shimoda who usually just gets amused at every step of the design, notify God’s approval, and be the rookie of the design team. I did have a hard time remembering the names due my exposure to the translated names first so remembering the names in the subtitles of the anime until they used the translated names.

There’s a great variety of animals featured within this show. From familiar faces such as giraffes and elephants to animals the target audience would not even think would exist such as Hallucigenia and Chondrocladia. As I said there are also mythical creatures, such as unicorns and pegasuses (pegasi?), featured to explain why they won’t survive on earth. While the end designs do feel predictable (probably because I have been exposed to previews, read a few chapters of the manga, and have some animal smarts) I am sure that to people who either aren’t invested in animals or novice animal fans would be shocked to see how most designs end up being finalized (SPOILER!: such as a pegasus being made into a bat. SPOILER)

I don’t like giving final verdicts of media because I feel like I would be in the minority and I am not confident enough to put my opinion on a scale. However while not a perfect anime, Heaven’s Design Team is a fine show with a decent plot and characters and does feature a great variety of animals which is charming. If I had to give it a rating, I would rate it a 7/10. Compared to other unhyped animes with animals in them (read: animal animes that are not Beastars nor BNA) this would be the best one and I would highly recommend it if you want to watch a decent anime with animals in it.


P.S. There are 3 volumes of the manga have already been translated to English. The Translation of the fourth volume is out in 23rd of March.

 

I’ve seen a few clips on YouTube and it looks pretty cool, I’ll have to check it out sometime.