10 Movies With Ant-Sized Characters You Have To See

2. Honey, I Shrunk The Kids (1989)

Probably the most famous of all these movies, Honey I Shrunk The Kids is a classic family comedy from the ‘80s, and it’s pretty clearly inspired by many of the shrinking films of the past.

You’ve got the sequences of characters going through a familiar environment that is suddenly extremely dangerous. You’ve got the use of animals that turn into giant monsters, and you even have a scene with giant drops of water like in The Incredible Shrinking Man.

Some of the special effects are surprisingly still great today, mostly because of the decision to use a lot of practical sets. For the extended sequence where the kids are in the backyard, rather than having them on a green screen with grass in the background, they walk through a tangible set that looks like a massive forrest, and it’s actually pretty cool looking.

This movie also follows both the kids and the adults who are living their normal lives, a wise move that not a lot of these films did. That way, it can play with the drama of the adults having no idea the kids are right there and unintentionally putting them in constant danger. This is the movie that introduced most kids to this bizarre little subgenre, and it's keenly aware of all the films that came before it.