9/10
Official trailer
I’ve watched Honey, I Shrunk the Kids three times. The film is hard to find. The Blu-ray release is out of print and trades at collector prices. As of this writing the film doesn’t appear to be available on any major streaming service. That’s its own commentary on how Disney values its own back catalog.
The 9 comes down to Rick Moranis at the peak of his career and a backyard built by hand out of props, puppets and giant cereal. I adore this movie. It’s warm and goofy and a little frightening in the right places, and it never talks down to the kids watching it. Whenever the camera drops to ant level I grin at how much physical work somebody put into a joke about a lawn.
The film sags a little in the middle. The plot is predictable in the way family adventure films of its era were supposed to be predictable. Neither of those issues is fatal. The film knows what it is and commits to it completely. It’s great for kids and it holds up for the adults who watched it as kids and now revisit it as parents.
The Setup
Wayne Szalinski is an inventor working on a shrinking ray in his suburban attic. The ray has been a series of failures. One morning, the device accidentally works. It shrinks four neighborhood kids to a quarter-inch tall. The kids end up in the backyard trash, then in the freshly mown lawn, and then have to find their way through what’s now an enormous and dangerous environment back to the house before Wayne realizes what has happened.
That’s the premise. The film commits to it with the kind of practical seriousness most modern family adventure films wouldn’t bother with. Every blade of grass becomes a tree. Every garden hose becomes a flood threat. Every insect becomes a potential predator.
The film doesn’t blink at the scale shift. The audience is asked to accept the world as the kids now experience it, and the practical effects deliver on the ask.
The Practical Effects
This is the foundation of the film and the reason it still works. The production built oversized props at quarter-inch scale: Cheerios the size of car tires, Lego bricks the size of refrigerators, a single blade of grass the height of a building.
The backyard scenes used scale models, forced perspective, blue screen compositing, robotic puppets, and real insects filmed at scale. Every frame was constructed instead of rendered.
The tactile quality is what makes the film work. When the kids climb a Cheerio, the audience can see that the Cheerio is a real object the actors are climbing.
When Antie the ant carries them across the yard, the puppet is a real puppet worked in real space. The shadows fall correctly. The actors react to physical objects in their eye line. The world has weight because the world is real, just at the wrong scale.
I think this is the best argument anyone could make for practical effects. That Cheerio is lumpy and real, and my brain believes it in a way it never believes a rendered one. When Antie’s legs move, I’m looking at a machine somebody built and wired, and I’d take that clunky puppet over a flawless digital ant any day.
For Writers
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is a model of scale-shift world building. The trick is that the location doesn’t change. The location is the same suburban backyard the kids have played in their entire lives. What changes is the kids’ relationship to the location. Familiar objects become alien threats. A garden sprinkler becomes a tropical storm. A bee becomes a flying predator. A scorpion becomes a Lovecraftian monster.
The lesson is that you can turn the familiar into the alien by changing the protagonist’s scale instead of changing the setting.
If you’re writing speculative fiction set in an ordinary location, ask yourself whether the setting could be made strange by altering the protagonist’s relationship to it instead of altering the setting itself. Scale is the cheapest and most powerful tool in the world-building toolkit. Honey runs the trick for an entire film and never exhausts it.
Rick Moranis As Wayne Szalinski
Rick Moranis is the comic anchor of the film. He plays Wayne as a man who’s brilliant and a disaster. Wayne is so deep in his own invention that he can’t keep track of normal life. He forgets to pick up milk and forgets the names of his neighbors. Then he shrinks his own children by accident and doesn’t notice for several scenes because he’s busy with something else.
Moranis commits to the performance without ever winking at the audience. Wayne is funny because he’s real. The character could have been a cartoon mad scientist. Moranis plays him as a slightly distracted suburban father whose brain works at a frequency the rest of his family can’t quite reach. The performance powers the parent subplot and is the emotional center of the film’s final act.
The Cheerios Sequence
The structural centerpiece. The kids are tiny. They’re starving. They find a fallen Cheerio in the grass. The Cheerio is the size of a tractor tire. They climb it. They break pieces off. They eat. The sequence runs about four minutes and is among the most quoted set pieces in 1980s family cinema.
The sequence works because the production built actual giant Cheerios at the correct scale.
The actors are climbing real objects. The food they break off is real food at the correct scale. The audience reads the sequence as plausible because every visual element is physically present in the shot. The Cheerios scene alone justifies the film’s reputation as a practical-effects masterpiece.
The Antie Subplot
The kids befriend an ant during their trip across the yard. They name him Antie. Antie carries them across difficult terrain. Antie is a robotic puppet that the kids physically interact with on set, blended with animation and forced-perspective shots of real ants for the wider compositions.
A scorpion kills Antie in the third act.
The death is the film’s most emotionally serious moment. The kids mourn. Wayne, who has been searching for them, finds the tiny body and understands that his children have been through something real out there. The scene is the closest the film comes to real sadness and the audience feels it more than they would have predicted at the start of the runtime.
The Antie scene gets me. It’s a family comedy killing off a robot ant, and it still hits like a punch, because the film spent real time making him a friend. I don’t think Disney would let a family film do this today, and this one did it without apology, then got on with the rescue. Gutsy.
For Writers
The Antie death is a lesson in emotional stakes for family adventure. The film could have run the whole runtime as light slapstick without ever letting the audience worry about consequences. Instead it introduces Antie, makes him a real character through specific physical business, and then kills him. The death isn’t gratuitous. It establishes that the world the kids are crossing has real consequences. After Antie dies, the audience reads every later threat as threatening. The film won the right to be funny by being briefly sad.
If you’re writing for kids or a young audience, the lesson is that emotional weight is the seasoning that makes everything else taste right. A purely silly story sits flat on the palate. A silly story with one moment of real grief lingers. The Antie death is two minutes of screen time that raises the entire film around it.
The Parents Subplot
While the kids are crossing the yard, the parents are slowly figuring out what happened. Wayne discovers the broken machine. Diane realizes the kids aren’t where they should be. The neighbors get involved. The parents search the house and the trash. The subplot intercuts with the kids’ adventure throughout the runtime.
The parent subplot serves two purposes. First, it gives the adult viewers in the audience a perspective to anchor themselves in. The kids are having an adventure. The parents are having a crisis. Both responses to the situation are valid. Second, it allows the film to pay off the family-comedy elements without making the kids deal with adult dynamics. The kids stay in adventure mode. The parents handle the worry. The film respects both tones.
For Writers
Parallel rescue subplots are a useful structure for family adventure stories with kid protagonists. The kids carry the adventure. The adults carry the worry. Each storyline serves a different audience demographic in the same film. Kids in the audience identify with the kids on screen and live the adventure with them. Adults in the audience identify with the parents and feel the dread. Both groups are engaged with different emotional tones. The intercutting between the two storylines also lets the film modulate pace.
When the kid storyline gets heavy (Antie dies), the cut to the parents searching gives the audience a breath. When the parent storyline gets emotionally intense, the cut to the kid storyline relieves the pressure. The structure is a pacing tool as much as a narrative tool. If you’re writing for a mixed-age audience, consider whether your story could support a parallel adult perspective that intersects with the main protagonist storyline instead of dominating it.
The Middle Sag And The Predictability
The film has two honest issues that keep it at 9 instead of higher.
First, the middle sags. After the Cheerios sequence and before the scorpion attack, the film runs through several backyard adventures that feel like they’re filling time instead of advancing the plot. The bee ride is fun. The lawn sprinkler sequence is competent. Neither one is essential. The film could lose ten minutes from the second act and tighten the overall pacing.
Second, the plot is predictable. The audience knows from the opening reel that the kids will be returned to normal size by the closing credits. It also knows Wayne will find them and the family will end up closer than they started. None of this is a flaw exactly.
Family adventure films of the late 1980s were designed to be reassuring instead of surprising. The predictability is built into the genre.
I’d cut the sprinkler sequence first and trim the bee ride second. They’re fine, and I’m never bored during them, but I can feel the film treading water between the Cheerio and the scorpion, and that loose stretch is the bigger of the two reasons it isn’t a 10. The predictability is a smaller sin. The genre promised me the kids would come home, and I’d have felt cheated if they didn’t.
These issues don’t derail the film. The 9 is the right rating for a family adventure that’s honest about what it’s doing and excellent at the doing.
The Disney Late-80s And Early-90s Era
It’s part of a moment in Disney filmmaking that no longer exists. The late 1980s and early 1990s were the era of Disney live-action family adventure: original concepts produced on serious budgets with practical effects and competent direction, marketed at families and earning their box office through quality instead of franchise use. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids in 1989. The Rocketeer in 1991. The Mighty Ducks in 1992. Cool Runnings in 1993. Hocus Pocus in 1993. Angels in the Outfield in 1994.
The Big Green in 1995. Mighty Joe Young in 1998.
This era of Disney filmmaking doesn’t exist in 2026. Modern Disney has leaned almost exclusively on franchise extension: Marvel acquisitions, Star Wars acquisitions, live-action remakes of animated classics, sequels to existing properties.
The original family-adventure pipeline that produced Honey, I Shrunk the Kids has been almost entirely shut down. Disney hasn’t made an original live-action family adventure of comparable quality in roughly fifteen years, with rare exceptions.
The film is therefore both a great film in its own right and a representative of a kind of filmmaking the studio no longer attempts.
Rick Moranis And The Legacy
Rick Moranis retired from on-screen acting in 1997 to raise his two children as a single parent after the death of his wife Ann Belsky from breast cancer in 1991.
He was forty-four years old and at the peak of his career. The retirement wasn’t a temporary pause. Moranis has stayed away from on-screen acting for nearly thirty years, with brief exceptions for voice work in animated films.
His filmography before retirement is a very accomplished comedy run across the 1980s and early 1990s. Strange Brew in 1983. Ghostbusters in 1984. Streets of Fire in 1984. Brewster’s Millions in 1985. Little Shop of Horrors in 1986. Spaceballs in 1987. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids in 1989. Parenthood in 1989. Ghostbusters II in 1989. My Blue Heaven in 1990. L.A. Story in 1991. Splitting Heirs in 1993. The Flintstones in 1994. Big Bully in 1996.
He worked with Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Mel Brooks, Steve Guttenberg, John Candy, Frank Oz, and Ron Howard during this period. The decision to walk away was made at the height of an extraordinary career.
Moranis has spoken about the retirement in interviews as a deliberate choice to be present for his children.
He hasn’t regretted it. He briefly considered a return for a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids reboot announced in 2020 but the production hasn’t visibly progressed. The reboot’s status remains unclear and Moranis hasn’t committed to any new on-screen work. Leaving that career behind in 1997 ranks among the most graceful exits in Hollywood history.
He left at the top, for the right reasons, and he stayed gone. The choice deserves respect.
The Wayne Szalinski performance in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is one of the high-water marks of his career and one of the reasons the film holds up. Moranis doesn’t coast. He commits to a slightly absent-minded suburban father with the same precision he brought to every other major role. The film is great in part because he was great in it, and Moranis being great is one of the things 1980s and 1990s comedy fans have learned to take seriously even when the films around him weren’t.
Craft: The Disney Family Adventure Era As A Closed Window
Craft Note
The Disney late-80s and early-90s live-action family adventure era is a closed window in American filmmaking and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is one of its defining entries. Three specific factors made the era possible.
First, mid-range budgets. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids cost thirty-two million dollars in 1989 and grossed two hundred and twenty-two million worldwide. The economics worked at that scale. Modern Disney films cost two hundred to three hundred million and require franchise marketing to recoup. The mid-range family adventure budget no longer exists in studio filmmaking.
Second, practical effects as a competitive advantage. Joe Johnston had spent the previous decade at Industrial Light and Magic working on Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and other Spielberg-Lucasfilm collaborations. He brought ILM-grade practical effects expertise to a family comedy with a modest budget. The result was a film that looked more expensive than it was and that aged better than its CGI-era successors. The practical-effects expertise that made the era possible is largely gone from contemporary American filmmaking, replaced by digital pipelines that produce different and weaker results.
Third, original premises. The studio was willing to greenlight ideas that hadn’t been pre-vetted through novel adaptations, sequels, or franchise extensions. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was an original screenplay. The Rocketeer was a relatively obscure comic-book character. Cool Runnings was based on a true story but not on any pre-existing IP. The willingness to invest in original family adventure premises ended at Disney sometime around 2010 and hasn’t returned at scale.
That makes it both a great film in its own right and an artifact of a filmmaking model that the studios no longer use. Watching it now is partly the experience of being reminded what mid-budget original family adventure used to look like, and partly the experience of recognizing how unlikely a similar film would be to get made today.
Is Honey, I Shrunk the Kids as good as people say?
A 9. This is Disney live-action family adventure at its peak and a practical-effects achievement that still looks better than most of what’s come since. Rick Moranis is the comic anchor, the kid performances are excellent and Joe Johnston’s direction is precise. The Cheerios scene alone is worth the runtime. The middle sags and the plot is predictable, and neither one costs the film more than a point.
I’ve watched it three times. I’d watch it again if it were available, which it largely isn’t. The film has slipped into the strange limbo of Disney back-catalog titles that the studio has chosen not to make accessible. The Blu-ray is out of print. The streaming availability is limited or absent. Visitors who want to see it have to track down secondhand copies or wait for occasional rotation onto Disney+.
It makes me mad that a film this good is this hard to see. Disney owns a 9 and treats it like a 4, and anybody who wants to show it to their kids has to go hunting for a secondhand copy. The film justifies every point of that rating on the screen, and it deserves an owner who’ll put it back where people can find it.
