The sociology of fast food con men take on philosophical and historical importance in Oshii Mamoru’s hilarious and bizarre film, Tachiguishi: The Amazing Lives of Fast Food Drifters. Oshii’s frames the film as a documentary survey of post-war fast food grifting, told in a form somewhere between photography and animation, where people and places are photographed in stills and then painted over and given rough animation that, in turns, melts in its morphing smoothness and lurches as gaps between photos are roughed over by the technique. Taking inspiration from a presumably fictional study of the grifters by an author named Inukai, the film gives short, often quite funny biographies of people who seem like innocuous social miscreants: a youth who tries to get a free meal by telling a pathetically thin sob story, an old man who contemplates the “landscape” of sbowl of noodles only to eat up the object of his contemplation, and a woman who, if her beauty doesn’t get her free eats, plays a variation of Rock, Paper, Scissors for the meal. The portentous—and continuous—voice-over for this fake documentary invests each of these people both odd and banal with vast significance for Japan, finding not only philosophy in their methods but also seeing in their particular and individual kinds of grift emblems of each character’s epoch in post-war Japan. Opening on the bombing of Tokyo, the film claims that so-called fast food grifting became a common practice in the urban rubble as merchants were forced to open outdoor stalls and fast food, streetside noodle shops became common. Thus the first legendary grifter, whose technique involved the appreciation and then consumption of the noodle “landscape,” expressed something of the changing urban lifestyle of the Occupation and immediate postwar. Likewise, in the 1970s and 1980s come grifters who challenge the mass-regulated structures of fast food chain restaurants. Between these legendary and emblematic individuals Oshii fills in history both real and vital to Japanese history (such as the Tokyo Olympics, U.S.-Japan security treaty protests, and the post-Occupation economic boom) along with ridiculous and sometimes fictional events of the time, such as rampant youth criminal gangs, bizarre robberies, exploding cola scares and the hula-hoop craze. Although his tone is jovial and his approach is obviously somewhat parodic and definitely humorous, Oshii is certainly getting at something serious, and that is seeing forgettable social rejects and ridiculous urban myths and caricatures as expressions and allegories of contemporary culture and history. Who says that the methods of con artists trying to bum food cannot speak for their epoch? The idea seems absurd, but Oshii’s fictional heroes are hilariously interrogated with such rigor and over-reading by the film’s narrator that it seems like a serious historical gaff to have not considered the legend of “Medium-Hot Sabu” as indicative of a shift in representation of urban character from social citizens to legendary myths, or of “Crying Inumaru” as a horde of wayward youths with inauthentic links to the war trying to cash in on national disaster. Although Oshii’s curious animation technique can often seem as banal as it can strangely hypnotic (despite the epic scope of the film the director often hangs onto an image for ages, slowly, slowly zooming in on it), and gives a lugubrious kind of false life to this false history of false heroes reflecting real history.