Honey, I Shrunk the Kids

It will be interesting to see what the pint-size movie audience prefers during the next few weeks: the imaginative but rather dark visions of Batman, or the more innocuous, kiddie-scaled pleasures of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

While Batman is a more ambitious and visionary property, there is something less threatening about the benign gags of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, a new Walt Disney production. It’s the latest entry in what seems to be a nearly foolproof genre, the genre of little humans trapped in a large universe.

It has been effective, from the teeny experiments of the devious Dr. Pretorious in The Bride of Frankenstein to the existential dilemma of The Incredible Shrinking Man. But Honey is more on the level of that 1960s TV series Land of the Giants. In other words, it’s a daffy excuse to unleash some nutty, oversize special effects.

The problems begin when the new matter-reducing machine created by nebbish genius Wayne Szalinski (Rick Moranis) is accidentally turned on his two kids (Amy O’Neill and Robert Oliveri) and the two neighbor kids (Thomas Brown and Jared Rushton). The children promptly find themselves just slightly smaller than the average fly, and abruptly swept up and deposited in the backyard with the garbage.

The rest of the movie charts their progress through the overgrown yard, as they trek past huge leaves of grass and swim in pools of mud. Naturally, there’s battle to be done with giant bees and a Cadillac-size cigarette butt.

The special effects are along the lines of Ray Harryhausen’s classic monsters in Mysterious Island and other ’50s giant-insect films. There’s even a friendly insect who helps the kids across the lawn. This may be the first movie in which the audience will cry at the death of an ant.

Director Joe Johnston, whose background in special effects work includes the creation of Yoda for the Star Wars movies, keeps everything lighthearted. There’s nothing of substance here, but as kid-shrinking movies go, it’s pretty good.

The film is preceded by a short cartoon called Tummy Trouble, which revives two of 1988’s big stars, Roger Rabbit and Baby Herman, last seen tormenting each other in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. This outing contains the expected violence and anarchy, plus a cameo appearance by curvaceous Jessica Rabbit, but it’s no match for the frenetic opening sequence of last year’s feature. Still, the whole program makes for a nice evening out.

First published in The Herald, June 24, 1989

The Bat-movie and this one both cleaned up. It was originally supposed to be directed by Stuart Gordon, which would surely have been a much different film. I’m not sure why this review is so blah – we all have off nights – but it’s extremely brief, and obviously I had to make room for the Roger Rabbit short.