God’s orders to the design team never seem to stop, they need to populate an entire planet after all! But sometimes it seems like this client is having a harder and harder time coming up with new requests. “A useless animal”? “A treelike animal”? “An animal that looks just like a plant (°Д°) “? “A bird that doesn’t lay eggs”? “My one and only Cinderella” plus “a long floral friendship”?! These designers won’t be out of a job anytime soon, that’s for sure!
Parts of these two volumes were adapted into the anime so some chapters, like the cast dealing with being de-aged or Venus trying to create a bird that gives live birth, will be familiar to anyone who checked out the anime. I will admit that the jokes aren’t quite as funny the second time around but that’s not going to stop me from recommending the anime in general or recommending that anime viewers pick up the manga and continue on! Especially since there are still so many “gosh, life is WEIRD” jokes to be mined, and not just animals! We have now been introduced to two of Pluto’s former coworkers, Yo and Ko of the plant department who give off strong host club vibes and I look forward to more weird plant facts to accompany the weird animal facts in future volumes.
Which isn’t to imply that the plants are the strangest creatures in this volume, the animals remain pretty weird as well! Normally I do pretty well at guessing what creature they’ll end up making but there were a couple with especially weird biologies (like, multi-species parasitics???) that gave me pause, and I have no idea what Pluto was working towards in her volume 6 cliffhanger of killing off all males! There were one or two times when I felt like the premise got stretched a bit too far and that what was created didn’t match what actually was in the real world especially well, but I can overlook that a few times for the sake of the comedy to get to that point.
For all that I laughed less when I saw the jokes a second time in the anime, I won’t say that there’s no re-watch/re-readability to this series. While double-checking details for this review I found myself once again cracking up at chapters like “Mercury tries to design ‘an animal that runs at full speed'” and do wish I had gifs of those scenes to spread around the internet. At this point, I do think that the comedy works a little better in manga form than anime, I feel as if the pacing and flow just work slightly better when they aren’t rigidly confined to an anime episode’s runtime, but I’ll continue recommending this series to everyone, pre-teens and up, who want a bit of education mixed in with their laughter.