10 Movies With Ant-Sized Characters You Have To See

Marvel’s Ant-Man is being praised as one of the studio’s most original works to date, but as fun and creative as the Paul Rudd movie is, it’s actually very clearly influenced by a lot of films that came before it.

That’s because the “shrinking man” genre has been around for decades now, going all the way back to the era of classic sci-fi B-movies. It’s the age-old story of a character suddenly becoming only a few inches tall, and so now their once familiar environment is like a massive labyrinth full of all sorts of danger. Inevitably, some kind of animal will usually show up, and a cute little dog is transformed into a giant beast on par with Cerberus. 

In almost every iteration, it's a story all about perspective. The audience is reminded how different things can seem when looked at from another angle; an innocent drop of water becomes a giant waterfall, or a pair of scissors becomes a gladiatorial weapon. And perhaps it makes you think about how small your problems really are in the grand scheme of things.

From 1936 all the way up to 2015, here are 10 great movies with characters that shrink down in size. 

The shrinking motif is given a bit more of a horror treatment early on in 1936’s The Devil-Doll. (Not to be confused with the 1964 movie Devil Doll which was the subject of a Mystery Science Theater Episode.) 

A scientist has invented a shrinking formula, hoping that making people smaller will allow the Earth’s resources to last longer. That's certainly a unique premise. The scientists dies, but then Paul, who was wrongly convicted of a crime, decides to use the formula for an entirely different purpose: to get revenge on the men who framed him.

He hires two guys to shrink down and sneak into his business associates’ homes via porcelain dolls, basically just to harass them until they all eventually confess and die. Paul disguises himself as an old woman selling the dolls for some reason, but hey, why not?

The Devil-Doll follows many of the tropes of a killer doll movie, but it’s just that in this case the dolls are shrunken down humans. They look quite good for 1936, far better than some of the shrinking movies made 30 years later. It’s a strange and sometimes slow film, but one that mixes in dark comedy and good special effects to make for a pretty interesting watch.