It’s hard to tune out the news at the moment, but “Cells at Work!” offers a temporary balm. Hideki Takeuchi’s film depicts a thriving society in which everyone has a valuable role to play and cooperation is the key to keeping malign forces at bay. Granted, this inspirational drama plays out inside a human body rather than the body politic, but I’ll take whatever I can get right now.

It’s based on a manga series by Akane Shimizu, first published in 2015, which explains the wonders of physiology using anthropomorphized characters. Chief among these are a plucky red blood cell known simply as AE3803 (Mei Nagano) and her platonic buddy and protector, white blood cell U-1146 (Takeru Satoh).

While AE3803 spends her days transporting crates of oxygen in the manner of a takkyūbin delivery worker, U-1146 is constantly on the hunt for pathogens, which he dispatches with a hunting knife and gravity-defying acrobatics. They’re just two of the trillions of cells populating the body of Niko (Mana Ashida), a high school student who lives with her slobby dad, Shigeru (Sadao Abe).