Tenchi Souzou Design-bu

It's a silly edutainment show about a team of designers to whom God (a fussy client we never see) has outsourced the creation of animals. The show both revels in design-focused humour (clients are the worst) and teaches you about the biology and physiology of various animals (in way more detail than I would have expected); it actually doesn't feel like it's aimed at kids?

It's also very much a series of vignettes within and across episodes, where the continuity is mostly about the relationships between characters, who are really diverse and fun. There's some nice gender expression diversity (i.e., a super soft and sweet ... muscular man designing cute animals like Otters, a little girl who makes the creepiest and grossest animals like poisonous frogs, a rowdy beer-swilling female engineer), and there's a trans woman character (Venus / Kanamori) - though, she's played by a male actor, which is not ideal.

Would strongly recommend for folks looking for something silly, sweet, and light!

About as simple as it gets, without any aspirations to be anything other than a slightly manic workplace comedy. It's also surprisingly educational; I definitely picked up a few extra animal facts here and there. Mostly, it's carried by its characters, who are all very fun and silly and chaotic and charming.

It's very fun to watch with friends; me and the people I was watching this with made a very fun game out of trying to guess what animal the team were designing at any given point. Often everyone was wrong. There's probably a good drinking game in there somewhere...

Heaven's Design Team is an anime that...
Well, it's not an anime in a default sense. There's no plot. There's no punchline.

What Heaven's Design Team IS, is a lightweight easy-to-digest trivia about various animals.
It's not bad, but it's not good either.
All the micro-episodes follow the same pattern:
-god orders the design team to make some seemingly fucked-up animal (think "make an animal whose males go through pregnancy!")
-design team makes some noodle-doodle play-doh monster that fulfills that requirement without dying from some critical body failure
-they add some final touches to the design
-a-HA! it turns out it was Seahorses ALL ALONG!!!! Crazy, ain't it, dear viewer?!?!!
...
And rinse and repeat. Well, I'll admit that the idea is... servicable, but 5 minutes of watching just to know that this animal is fucked up in this way, or that animal is fucked up in that way is way too long. Any shred of comedy evaporates by the time punchline arrives, but then again the amount of educational information isn't dense enough to properly be an educational anime.

Characters are cardboard archetypes too, you'll know exactly what to expect from them at a glance, and they won't become anything more, ever.


IN SUMMARY
This anime's strong point is the fact that it doesn't have glaring weak points, so even though it's a lukewarm, glorified trivia pop-up ad in a form of anime, you will only regret using your time to watch it (contrary to bad anime where you hate losing your time memorizing garbage you'd rather forget).

So, if you want to waste some time and have nothing great to watch, it's a good time-filler with no substance (and no consequences).