An ocean scientist meets his childhood hermit crab friend before his environmental speech.


HERMIE is used with permission from Anthony Pitsilos and Jonathan Becker. Learn more at https://linktr.ee/gapitsilos and https://jonathanbecker.info.


Henry is an ocean scientist on the verge of giving a big speech at an environmental science conference, a huge career milestone for him. He retreats to a bathroom at the convention center to practice his speech.

When he finally finds himself alone, he tries to focus on his speech. But his concentration is interrupted by the re-appearance of his imaginary childhood friend, Hermie, a garrulous hermit crab who kept him company at Turtle Beach. Hermie has no home anymore and asks Henry to help him out. But Henry is now a grown-up with grown-up responsibilities, and wonders if there's any room in his life for a former imaginary playmate.

Directed by Anthony Pitsilos and Jonathan Becker, from a script co-written with Ian Battaglia, this poignant short drama is a paean to the lost, humble wonders of a rapidly changing natural world, along with the loss of childhood innocence. Combining live-action with stop-motion animation that brings Hermie to life, it balances melancholy and whimsy to create a gently thought-provoking portrait of a man caught between childhood ideals and adult realities.

The narrative is based on Nathaniel Rich's well-regarded short story of the same name, and like that story, it weaves flashes of a visually warm and textured nostalgic past of beach excursions and playing in the sand with the more prosaic present, rendered in a clean, cool naturalism. The backbone is essentially a long conversation between Henry and Hermie, and the deft dialogue exposes the gap between the young Henry that Hermie remembers -- loving the ocean and its creatures, curious, optimistic, and caring -- and the smooth but somewhat detached adult Henry that Hermie encounters.

While the adult Henry has taken his childhood love of the ocean and parlayed that into a career, the careerist aspect of his work seems to have taken over. He relishes the ultra-sophisticated, complex title of his paper, but he seems to have forgotten the real-world implications of his research: the beaches that are homes to creatures like Hermie are eroding and disappearing. As Henry, actor Mike Schminke ably conveys the aspiring professionalism of the grown-up scientist, along with the flickers of childhood idealism that seem to have been lost along the way.

Hermie, of course, is a concrete reminder of the cost of eroding beaches, and he asks if Henry can find him a home, suggesting that Henry take him home. But Henry can't see a place for his childhood imaginary friend in his adult life in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife and daughter, who hasn't even played in the ocean. Like Hermie, we see the gap between the spark of childhood enthusiasm and passion and how it got lost in striving for career and professional achievement. Resigned to his obsolescence, Hermie asks Henry to flush him down the toilet, in hopes of finding a new home somewhere. While the ending of the short story is bleaker, we're left with a sense of ambiguity at the end of the film, wondering if Henry's glimmer of childhood idealism and passion will find its way into his work with new urgency, or if he will continue with business as usual.