Master Keaton defies categorization and crosses all story genres.

Master Keaton. V.1, Excavation I. V.2, Excavation II. V.3, Killer Conscience. V.4, Blood & Bullets. V.5, Blood & Dust. V.6, Fakers & Friends. V.7, Life & Death. V.8, title TBD.
TV and OAV series (39 episodes), 1998-2000. Director: Masayuki Kojima. V.1-7, 5 episodes/115 minutes; V.8, 4 episodes/95 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $29.98. Distributor: Geneon/Pioneer Entertainment.

Master Keaton (39 episodes, episodes 1-24 broadcast October 6, 1998 to March 29, 1999 and episodes 25-39 released direct to video monthly from June 21, 1999 to June 21, 2000) could easily be a live-action TV series, but what genre would it fit into? Drama? Comedy? Suspense? Detective? Educational? Romance? Just say Human Interest. You never know what the next episode will bring.

The first episode introduces Keaton as a college lecturer moonlighting as an insurance investigator for Lloyds of London, looking into a suspicious death in a picturesque Greece village. The climax reveals that he was in the SAS (British Army commandos) in his youth. The second episode, in Dusseldorf with German radical terrorists, fills in his full name and some background: Taichi Keaton-Hiraga, father Japanese, mother British, avocation archaeology. The third episode, in Florence and Marseilles, adds that Keaton is divorced but has a teen daughter of his own. Each episode is a separate mini-drama which adds to the picture of just who Keaton is: one of those nondescript men who generally goes unnoticed or underestimated, but turns out to be skilled in detection, self-defense, historical knowledge, art criticism, personal counseling -- a genuine Most Unforgettable Man I Ever Met.

A few of the setups are unconvincingly melodramatic, such as his just happening to run into some Russian Mafia thugs while in eastern Poland. But once the action starts the characterizations are very convincing. There are murder mysteries both as serious detection puzzlers and as comedies (as when Keaton is grabbed by an elderly would-be Miss Marple to serve as her bumbling assistant). There are tender stories such as Keaton helping the arguing sides in a child custody case realize what is best for the child, or Keaton playing Cupid for a young couple in London's Chinatown by tracking down a recipe for a rare Chinese delicacy that Sun Yat Sen brought when he was a refugee in Britain before the Chinese Revolution of 1911. There is suspense as when Keaton must help a disillusioned IRA terrorist defuse a bomb in a crowded department store, or when Keaton must escape on foot from a killer dog tracking him through the Spanish Pyrenees.

The characters are intelligent, the dialogue is witty, and you will want to find out more about Keaton: why he is working in (or out of) London while his family is in Tokyo, how he came to be both a college intellectual and a detective and anti-terrorist expert. Master Keaton is not good animation in the sense that it is flashy and memorable as animation, but it is excellent animation (by the Madhouse studio) in that it does just what it needs to do to bring the characters to life and make you want to watch every episode.