1. Main characters
A boy and a fish (mermaid)
2. Summary
One day, a boy helped out a fish. He then saw it as a beautiful mermaid through his imagination. After the boy and the mermaid shared an enjoyable time, he brought her home. However, his parents told him that the mermaid was just a fish. Police officers came to make him admit that it was just his imagination. When he denied, they tortured him so that he would forget about the mermaid. Yet he didn't, so they forced the boy to read a lot of books. The boy began to forget what the mermaid looked like and ran to his house. There he saw a fish, not a mermaid, so he decided to return it to the ocean. As he let the fish go in agony, the fish turns into a mermaid, and many people, including the police officers who came to capture the boy again, stares at the ocean horizon in awe.
3. What happened at the end
I think the boy committed suicide by going into the water himself because he wished to run away from the world that did not allow free ideas, thoughts, and imagination.
4. Messages given by the filmmaker
This video was created in the 1960s. It was probably the time when parents in Japan were devastated to put their children in intelligent schools through hard examinations, which ended up in making the children think and act in the similar way. Through this movie, I think Tezuka Osamu intended to bring out the issue of children in Japan being completely the same. He feared the situation of the young people becoming averaged and having no individualities. I believe that the filmmaker wanted to tell us how important and wonderful it is to have our own free ways of thinking.
