Mamoru Oshii is best known here and abroad as an anime auteur whose works, from the seminal dystopian SF "Kokaku Kidotai" ("Ghost in the Shell," 1995) to the air-action epic "Sky Crawlers" (2008), have often viewed the future of humanity through a glass darkly.

In the former film, the citizens of a Hong-Kong-like future city, both human and cyborg, confront malevolent forces in the digital data stream that threaten their very identities. In the latter, elite pilots fight an endless air war cynically designed as lethal mass entertainment by faceless corporate entities.

But Oshii has another, more playful side that he has unleashed in two animation omnibuses about grifters who eat and run from fast-food joints, released in 2006 and 2007, and in the live-action shorts he has both made and produced. One was his contribution to the 2003 anthology "Five Bullets on Killers," in which a female assassin with a 50-caliber gun chomps her way through a pile of convenience store food — makers and calories all carefully noted — as she waits for her target.