This is a post about the short film we watched in class last week.
I'm going to start off with a brief summary.
A boy saved a fish near the pond, and in his mind the fish transformed itself into a mermaid. He instantly fell in love with the imaginary figure. He wanted to show everybody, but in his town, imagining things were not allowed therefore the police tried to make him realize that the mermaid he's been seeing is not real. However no matter what they did to get his feet back onto the ground, he couldn't stop imagining. Gradually, from the pressure from the police, the boy went insane and forgot what the mermaid looked like. He has lost his ability to imagine. He let the fish back into the ocean and he followed it and suddenly disappeared.
The ending of the story, from what I observed, seemed to be a little bit depressing. The scene where the boy walks into the ocean and disappears illustrates the boy's death. I think that Tezuka was trying to imply that without being able to creatively imagine things in one's mind, people will go crazy. Just living by the reality is too dull. People should have the right to freely create and see what they want. Since this film is one of the first story he wrote, I feel that maybe he was reflecting the story to his real life career as a comic artist.
