Honey, I Shrunk the Kids

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) is about an inventor shrinking his own children by accident. Wayne Szalinski is working on a shrinking machine in the attic and cannot get it to hold. While he is out the machine fires and reduces his two children, along with two from next door, to a quarter of an inch. He comes home, sweeps up the mess on the floor and takes the rubbish bag out to the garden. The children are in the back garden. The distance to the far end is the equivalent of two kilometres. The grass is a forest, an ant is a mount, the lawnmower is a catastrophe. The whole idea is scale. An ordinary garden becomes a territory to explore once the size changes, and it shows directly how a child's imagination works. It was Joe Johnston's first film as director. He had been a designer at ILM, working on the Star Wars films, and the sense of scale comes from there. The oversized sets were genuinely built: enormous blades of grass, a Lego brick, a biscuit. Most of the effects are practical. It became Disney's highest grossing live action film to that point and produced two sequels and a series. Rick Moranis plays the father. There is an ant, and it carries the film's emotional weight. It runs 93 minutes. Good for: family film, watching with children, and the eighties. Less good for: the effects have dated and the plot is very simple.