Fun for any age, except perhaps the teen one excessively concerned to be "with it." It may be that the accidental reduction of four children to the size of "boogers," and the inadvertent depositing of them in a plastic trash bag in the backyard, could be seen by the cultured adult as a "metaphor" or something of children's "powerlessness" or something. But the movie doesn't encourage spending a lot of time in the metaphorical troposphere. Getting much more quickly down to the same kind of business as The Incredible Shrinking Man, it is a straightforward search-and-survival adventure, brimming with faith in the resourcefulness and self-sufficiency of children and in the obliviousness and battiness of adults. The action is fast, the comedy funny, and the two are adroitly commingled in moments that shift between a microscopic chaos and an Olympian aloofness. The special effects are good, but not ostentatiously and obnoxiously so. They might look less good to an eye well-acquainted with the world under a magnifying glass (or inside a Biology text), and any old eye might detect some convenient fudgings of scale: the kids do not appear to be the same size on the back of a bee as on the back of a baby ant. The latter entity, attaching itself to the shrunken kids as a pet, leads us perilously deep into the familiar terrain of Disney Cutesy. But this is no longer the era of Dean Jones, and the ant's last scene brings about a Gary Larson-ish alteration of perspective whereby we might contemplate anew all those ants whose blood is on our hands -- one of the nobler sorts of purposes, albeit one of the secondary purposes here, to which fantasy can ever be put. With Rick Moranis; directed by Joe Johnston. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd
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