I have already written articles about Giants, and their smaller counterpart covered in Little People, but this one was of thinking of how we have represented the smaller version in stories and films. Wondering again if there is some kind of smaller world we aren’t entirely aware of, or that we are the smaller ones and world already.

Alice in Wonderland – and that first strange room she needed to get through. With the eat me and drink me potions to make her big and small to fit through the door. But because everything was quite off there, it was difficult to discern thereafter, how big or small anything was as there was no starting point. Alice herself would have been the starting point had she remained the same size as in the ‘real world’, but as she didn’t, you weren’t able to tell unless they hinted at a large difference, i.e. walking through the ‘oversized’ flowers, making us think again that Alice was small and the flowers were what we would think of as normal size.

Honey I shrunk the kids – this shouldn’t really need any further explanation, even if you haven’t seen it, the title really does tell it like it is. The perils of being small in a big world, although comedy, was still a good idea to convey the sudden differences faced when you are a very small fish in a big pond.

Inner Space – a film about shrinking down someone to be put into the bloodstream of a human body. Seemed like just a bit of fun back then, these days, not so much once you know what scientists appear to be getting up to.

Downsizing – one I haven’t seen other than a clip for the trailer, of people wanting to shrink down to a smaller size to they can have more and be less of a drain on the normal size world. Creating a miniature functioning society, where the old world becomes full of giants and rather large structures, and the new small world gets on or something like that. Maybe what we think of as giants of the past, were just normal, and we were the shrunken weirdos?

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Mike TV, the annoying kid who gets transported into the television, but shrunk down as was the chocolate bar, to be fully formed, just smaller, or indeed, larger.

It’s a fascinating and crazy idea when you think of either supersizing, or minimising something which then remains intact and as it was just with a new size. And given all the things we have in the world which show where things were indeed much larger, and we have all been scaled down through temperature, climate and atmosphere over time. Imagine if that change was more instantaneous and could be caused by those things, it might be of interest to then create something that could harness that potential. Creating large and small as needed rather than waiting for nature to mosey along on its own timescale, people are impatient and mortal, so I can see why we find it hard to ‘wait and see’. But all that tinkering and experimenting comes at a price, and one I am not sure we are yet aware of…

(c) K Wicks