Pixar’s Inside Out may have won an Academy Award and spawned a record-breaking sequel, but storytellers have been assigning personalities to our emotions and internal organs for years.
British comic strip The Numskulls first appeared in 1962, while French cartoon Il était une fois … La vie tackled a similar idea in the 80s.

The year 2015 proved to be a banner year for such stories even before Inside Out premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Lee Dong-gun launched his Korean webtoon Yumi’s Cells that spring, which would later inspire a hit K-drama series. Akane Shimizu’s Japanese manga Cells at Work! dropped even earlier.

Something was clearly in the water – or rather the blood, as Shimizu’s story focuses on the exploits of anthropomorphised blood cells inside the body of a young girl.

Read my full South China Morning Post review here