Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989)
There are films that announce themselves as Important Events and films that simply turn up, do their job with a grin on their face, and leave you feeling better than you did before. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) belongs very much to the second category. The premise is clean and cheerfully absurd: a well-meaning but hopelessly distracted suburban inventor accidentally reduces his children, along with a couple of kids from next door, to roughly the size of a thumbnail, and then has the misfortune of unknowingly tossing them out with the rubbish into the back garden. What follows is a race against time as the teens attempt to cross what amounts to an enormous, hostile wilderness, while Dad tears the house apart looking for them. It is a high-concept B-movie pitch delivered with the full weight of the Disney machine behind it, and the film arrived at a moment when Walt Disney Pictures was quietly clawing its way back to mainstream relevance after a difficult decade, with the Silver Screen Partners arrangement providing the financial scaffolding for a string of live-action bets.
The director, Joe Johnston, was not yet the household name he would become, but he was hardly a newcomer to spectacle. He had spent years as a visual effects art director at Lucasfilm, picking up an Academy Award for his work on The Empire Strikes Back, and his sense of how to make practical effects feel genuinely tactile is all over this film. Johnston would later go on to direct Jurassic Park III, and you can see in both films the same appetite for creature-based set pieces built around physical, in-camera work rather than pure digital trickery. Here, working from a script by Ed Naha and Tom Schulman (based on a story by Stuart Gordon, Brian Yuzna and Naha), Johnston stages sequences involving oversized ants, lawnmower blades and a Lego brick the size of a sofa with a real sense of spatial invention. The production budget was a reported eighteen million dollars, which by the standards of late-eighties Disney was a meaningful commitment, and it is largely visible on screen in the set construction and the painstaking miniature work. The film opened to strong box office returns and essentially confirmed that the studio had a workable formula for crowd-pleasing family adventure that did not depend on animation.
The cast is a pleasantly low-key ensemble, which suits the material well. Rick Moranis, fresh from Ghostbusters and Spaceballs, plays Wayne Szalinski, the hapless inventor at the centre of the chaos, and he brings a loose, warm comedic energy to a role that could easily have tipped into irritation. Marcia Strassman as his wife provides the more grounded counterpoint, while Matt Frewer (best known at the time as Max Headroom) plays the blustering neighbour with the kind of broad, physical comedy that was very much in fashion. The younger cast members, including Thomas Wilson Brown and a pre-fame Amy O'Neill, carry much of the actual adventure story, and their performances are serviceable if uneven. Batman arrived in cinemas the same summer and dominated the cultural conversation, which perhaps explains why this film is sometimes overlooked when people discuss the stronger genre offerings of 1989, but it found its audience and held it.
On revisiting Joe Johnston’s 1989 family classic Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, it instantly transported me back to the golden era of those awesome Disney live-action affairs from the 90s when I was a kid. It’s the kind of film that doesn't exactly employ a roster of A-list superstar names (Rick Moranis leads the charge with his wonderfully eccentric, hammy energy as the scatterbrained inventor Wayne Szalinski) but it captures a very specific, nostalgic magic. It’s a proper B-movie script at its core, full of cheesy one-liners and wild scientific mishaps, but somehow, it just works on so many levels to deliver a genuinely good, all-round family film.
When you actually look at the nuts and bolts of the movie, it’s undeniably a bit average in terms of high cinematic art. The dialogue is wonderfully over-the-top, the acting from the younger cast is very much of its time, and the plot is as straightforward as they come. But that’s exactly the charm of it. Johnston directs it with a massive wink to the audience, leaning fully into the giant lawn mower and oversized ant sequences with a practical, tactile creativity that still holds up beautifully today. It doesn't take itself too seriously, and because it’s just so unapologetically fun, you can’t help but get completely swept up in the miniature madness.
Ultimately, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is a perfect example of a movie that knows exactly what it is and executes it with a massive amount of heart. It’s not trying to be a profound masterpiece; it’s just a cracking bit of weekend entertainment that brings the whole family together. In fact, watching it today, I genuinely think this is a movie that would be absolutely brilliant for a modern remake. Imagine the brilliant practical effects blended seamlessly with today's CGI, all while keeping that same hammy, lovable spirit.
It might be a delightfully average, B-movie romp, but it’s a brilliantly fun one that absolutely earns its place in the Disney live-action hall of fame.
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is the sort of film that rewards a certain generosity of spirit from the viewer, the willingness to meet it on its own terms rather than ones imported from elsewhere. Johnston's direction is polished but unremarkable outside those standout creature sequences, and the script is never going to trouble any awards panels, but neither of those things is really the point. What the film manages is something a fair few bigger, louder productions miss entirely: a consistent sense of fun that holds across different ages in the same room. For a studio that has since produced everything from Sleeping Beauty to live-action blockbusters costing ten times this budget, it is a useful reminder that sometimes the best family films are the ones that keep things bracingly simple. The garden was never this interesting before, and somehow it still isn't quite the same after.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1989 | Watched: 2026-06-26
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
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