Danica Davidson
November 9, 2023 
Many Americans will be celebrating Thanksgiving later this month with feasting, so it’s the perfect time to also release the food-themed OVA Okamoto Kitchen, which is brought to us by the Okamoto Kitchen business and a successful Kickstarter. The anime will be available to view on the Okamoto Kitchen YouTube channel at no charge. Meanwhile, a trailer has been released.
The layout and keyframes were done by Japanese animation studio Magic Bus, while Studio Nine Lives did Paint and in-between animation, and Previz, CGI, and compositing were all taken care of by Industry Visual Effects. The music was composed by Hidehito Ikumo.
In terms of the English cast, Cristina Vee plays Haru Umesaki, Allegra Clark plays Chef Chizuru, Patrick Seymour plays Mickey, Faye Mata plays Ling, and Kimlinh Tran plays Honey.
Okamoto Kitchen gave this description of the OVA:
The food truck industry is a brutal world! Savage races for parking spots, epic shonen food battles, and lots and lots of VIDEO GAMES! The naive Okamoto Kitchen food truck team of Haru, Chizuru, Mickey and Honey try their best to navigate their way around the unforgiving landscape of the Los Angeles food truck scene. Our heroes will have to push through the growing pains not only to figure out how to thrive in the food truck business, but to also discover who really has their best interests at heart. The culinary arts can sometimes be hard to digest.
Okamoto Kitchen itself is an L.A.-based catering business that has Universal Studios, SpaceX, Cartoon Network, Fox, Capcom, WayForward Gaming, and Atlus as some of its bigger clients, and gave this description of its work:
Chef Chizuru has managed to deftly bring together her experiences with both traditional and vegetarian Japanese food to bring a very unique Japanese experience. With her years of experience catering, you are guaranteed a professional and quality experience with hard to find Japanese items.
Source: Press release
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Danica Davidson is the author of the bestselling Manga Art for Beginners with artist Melanie Westin, plus its sequel, Manga Art for Everyone, and the first-of-its-kind manga chalk book Chalk Art Manga, both illustrated by professional Japanese mangaka Rena Saiya. Check out her other comics and books at www.danicadavidson.com.
