Mermaid by Tezuka Osamu

I think that this animation film criticizes people who tries to regulate the freedom of imagination. The characters are the boy, the mermaid, the military or a police and the boy’s parents. At the beginning of this film a boy finds a fish and thinks it is a mermaid. However, the freedom of imagination was not allowed in this country. People who seem to be a military or a police tries to make the boy forget the mermaid by torturing him. Eventually the boy has forgotten what the mermaid looked like. At the end of the film the boy gets expelled from the country. In this scene the mermaid appears again. You can tell that it is not a real mermaid since the people looking at the sea stood still didn’t seem to be surprised. I think it suggests that the boy was free from the regulation and was able to imagine things again. 

I think that Tezuka Osamu wants to tell people that to imagine things is a wonderful thing to do since the scene where the boy and the mermaid was swimming was depicted beautifully. In fact, some of his manga works like “Mighty Atom” were created with his imagination. I think that the discussion Tezuka Osamu wants us to have is about how wrong it is to restrict freedom of thought.