Mamoru Oshii is a world-class animation director, but his films, from the 1995 dystopian SF "Ghost In the Shell" to this year's air-war epic "The Sky Crawlers," are not for the masses. Instead they often explore heavyweight themes that appeal to anime otaku (ultrafans), from the dissolving boundaries between the human and the digital ("Ghost In the Shell") to the meaning of love and death in an alternative world where war is entertainment and warriors are ageless, recyclable youths ("The Sky Crawlers").
But Oshii also has a lighter side, as seen in two anthology features he supervised and contributed to — "Tachigui Retsuden" ("Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters," 2006) and "Shin Onna Tachigui Retsuden" ("The Women of Fast Food," 2008) — whose lead characters eat and then run out of restaurants without paying. I found the humor elephantine and in-jokey, but the animation, if limited in the extreme, was gorgeous.
His latest such project, "Kiru — Kill" ("Kill"), is a partial followup to "Assault Girl," his own segment in "Shin Onna Tachigui Retsuden." It is also similar to "Five Bullets on Killers," a 2003 anthology film Oshii supervised, in which Oshii and four other directors tried their hand at gun action, while keeping the preliminaries to a minimum.