Heaven’s Design Team is an office comedy at heart, apart from edutainment: designers, especially, will relate. God is a fickle client with vague directions and high demands, and each day at work is a mess because of his whims. Not only that, but designs get approved through an instant “enlightenment” and the proclamation “God Has Spoken!”.

There is of course the running gag with the horse, which was the one-hit-wonder of Tsuchiya or Saturn-san, and Meido’s kowai-kawaii creations. Several designs fail when they get to the engineering stage and this is where some of the funniest moments take place: we learn why Pegasus doesn’t exist or why creating a unicorn is not a good idea.

We just love the cast! Shimoda-kun, a timid young employee, is responsible for the communication between the team and God. Saturn-san is the oldest and most experienced but has an obsession with his famous design, the horse. Every time, he tries to come up with more animals that resemble his original design. Venus or Kanamori is flashy, with a penchant for dramatics - their impeccable style is a guarantee for stylish designs, like the hummingbird. Mizushima or Mercury is utilitarian - only what’s needed is part of his design, so the snake is naturally his masterpiece.

We have to point out that Crunchyroll’s localization choices have confused us - the first episodes use the Japanese names of the characters, while the most recent ones use their translations, the planet names. After a while, we got used to the changes, though.

This might not be high on your list, but watching anime and learning trivia can be pretty fun! Heaven’s Design Team succeeds in keeping the balance right: each episode has two parts and in between, we get two shorts that present us the final products, the animals featured today. The chibi characters confirm that yes, all the weird attributes of this episode’s animals are true. We don’t know about you, but we were shocked to learn that starfish have their stomach outside their bodies.