Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves (1997)

Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves arrives as the third installment in a franchise that had already spent its premise, and as the first live-action feature Walt Disney Pictures sent directly to home video. Dean Cundey, a cinematographer of real distinction, makes his directorial debut here, and the production proceeds with the brisk economy of a five-week shoot and a seven-million-dollar budget. Rick Moranis returns as Wayne Szalinski, the only actor to do so, and his electromagnetic shrink ray once again reduces the adults of a suburban household to the size of pocket change. What follows is a stretch of kitchen-floor peril involving a cockroach, a bowl of onion dip, and four parents learning to trust their children. The cultural soil here is firmly 1997, and the harvest is thin.

The film's social consciousness is faint and mostly incidental. Jenny rejects Ricky King for stealing a kiss without asking, and her mother's approval registers as a period-appropriate lesson about consent, delivered gently and then abandoned. The parenting advice is warmer still: let the boy play baseball, trust the teenager, do not sweat the small stuff. None of this amounts to a program. The Szalinski clan is uniformly white and comfortably suburban, and the lone non-white performer in the cast appears in a role of no narrative consequence. There is no engagement with race, no environmental anxiety, no meditation on the body, no interest in neurodivergence beyond a potassium deficiency that functions purely as a ticking clock. The film is content to be a comedy about very small people in a very large living room.

We search for ideology and find only merchandising. The mild anti-management gesture, Wayne surrendering the presidency of his lab to his brother and returning to the workbench, is a nod toward creativity that stops well short of any critique of capital. The film celebrates entrepreneurship, the nuclear family, and the Tiki Man, in that order. It is a harmless artifact, amiable and slight, and it asks nothing of its audience beyond ninety minutes of attention. We classify it accordingly, without resentment. Not every vintage rewards the cellar.