I'm in Love with Kimberly Johnson
2009 · 8m · USA
Directed by Adam Johns
Genres: coming-of-age, fantasy, romance
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
A young boy builds magical toy creatures for the girl of his dreams; but when they fail to spring to life on cue, he must rethink who is dream girl actually is.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A boy-loves-girl premise wrapped in whimsy—it sounds like every coming-of-age fantasy short ever made, which is exactly why Johns' execution has to be doing something genuinely weird underneath, and I suspect it is.
The tender, contemplative tone suggests a filmmaker aware of the romantic bildungsroman tradition, though at 8 minutes the real question is whether the formal choices—pacing, visual grammar, the economy of revelation—justify the fantasy frame or merely decorate it.
There's a specific choice here—whether in performance, sound design, or the particular way tenderness gets visualized—that turns a familiar premise into something that *feels* discovered rather than constructed, and that's where Johns either lands it or doesn't.