Summary
A boy who makes friends with a Mermaid is punished by the country for imagining freely, which was banned in the country. He is goes through many experiments and tortured until he can see the mermaid as a fish, like every other person did.
Evaluation
I think the mermaid represents the unknown things that come from across the sea to the Japanese. The boy kept on seeing the fish as a mermaid. He was brainwashed not to see the mermaid but to see the fish as everyone else believed in. In japan at war, the government wanted people to see the same thing as they saw so it was easier to fight against other countries by grouping up. Tezuka Osamu wanted the people to know that not everything is what they appear to be. Another intention he might of had was that he wanted to tell the importance of having your own thought. Just because every one else believes in a certain thing doesn't make it right. I believe that he wanted to tell people at war that by having an opened mind will make a hole difference to their lives. At the end of the movie you see the people seeing the mermaid and the boy playing in the ocean which might mean that Japan and people from across the sea can make peace together
