Hello! Although it seems too late, I'm going to write about two short movies.
Mermaid
A boy who loved daydreaming found a fish which was washed ashore at the beginning. When he let it return to the sea, he recognized the fish was mermaid. He brought the mermaid to his house to introduce it to his parents. They didn't believe him, however. The boy arrested because daydreaming was forbidden in his country. The policemen tried to make him forget the mermaid, and the boy forgot her little by little. One day he broke out the jail and return to home. Then what he saw was just a fish, not a mermaid. He picked up his fish and ran to the sea. When he let the fish to the sea, it became the mermaid who the boy met before. At last he swam to far away with the mermaid, and his parents and the policemen who came to catch the boy kept their stunned eyes on him.
The mermaid was only in his mind till the end, I think. The suppression of the boy was too strict, so he went completely mad and dived into the sea finally. What Tezuka want to say through this movie is, therefore, the importance of respect for individual.
Aquarios
This movie was more difficult for me to understand than Mermaid, same as Yura! But anyway, I'll do my best.
A woman had wanted to live in the sea with dolphins, so she had a study room under the sea. One day she found a man lying in her study room. She thought that he was actually a dolphin. She put him into a water tank. The man recovered consciousness while she fell asleep, and she enjoyed swimming in the water tank. But the man was only in her dream. At last the water tank was broken by a dolphin. The woman saved the dolphin, and then it went through a window and to the sea, like a ghost. She dived into the sea following the dolphin and enjoyed swimming.
This movie resembles Mermaid in a point: The main characters in both movies were dreamers. But the heroine of Aquarios was completely free. Nobody deny her imagination, which differ from Mermaid. Thus what the director wanted to hand on through Aquarios is also different from that of Mermaid: it is that all people are free in their dream, though their wish never come true.
