History Main / Lilliputians

* [[WesternAnimation/SpongeBobSquarepants SpongeBob SquarePants]]: Although the series takes place in an [[MouseWorld underwater world]], Plankton, the show’s main villain, is much smaller than the show’s other characters. Although his size is somewhat inconsistent throughout the series, he is usually portrayed as being about the size of a bug from the other characters’ perspective. It shouldn’t be surprising that he gets stepped on a lot.

* [[WesternAnimation/SpongeBobSquarepants SpongeBob SquarePants]]: Although the series takes place in an [[MouseWorld underwater world]], Plankton, the show’s main villain, is much smaller than the show’s other characters. It shouldn’t be surprising that he gets stepped on a lot.

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%%* Literature/TheBorrowers in ''Anime/{{Arrietty}}''.
* ''Manga/{{Doraemon}}''

* One issue of ''[[Creator/PhilFoglio What's New? With Phil And Dixie]]'' shows the title characters duking it out with inch-tall gaming miniatures. Phil wakes up tied to his bed with string, ''a la'' the original Lilliputians, at the end.

* The tiny marker sniffers in ''ComicStrip/{{Dilbert}}'' used to be normal people, but then they were... [[IncrediblyLamePun downsized]].

%%* The brownies from ''Film/{{Willow}}''.
* The Rhetons in ''Film/ThePhantomPlanet'' are humanoid but very small.

* The ''Film/MenInBlack'' movies. In the second movie an entire colony lives in Kay's locker. Also subverted in the second movie: Serleena's spaceship is shown to be tiny when it arrives on Earth, setting up an ''[[Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy HHGTG]]''-type gag, but then she shapeshifts into a normal-sized human.

%%* The Helmacrons in ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}''.

* Jonathan Swift's ''Literature/GulliversTravels'' is the TropeNamer, giving us Lilliputians, said to be around six inches tall. They're so popular "lilliputian" is actually a dictionary word that means "very small." Note that when Gulliver travels to Brobdingnag, he becomes the Lilliputian: Lilliputians are smaller than us at a 12:1 ratio, and humans are smaller than Brobdingnags at the same ratio. Yes, {{lampshade|Hanging}}d by the intellectual protagonist. Also similarly, "brobdingnagian" is in the dictionary too. Guess what it means?
** Modern pop culture remembers little about the Lilliputians other than their size and the famous GulliverTieDown scene, helped by an abridged book aimed at children that removed most of the context. In the original, heavily satirical text, the Lilliputians are a parody of the British and French aristocracy, based on the idea that they are intellectually small; thus they obsess over trivial matters, such as going to war over a disagreement on how to serve eggs. The Brobdingnagians, by contrast, are simple but wise, having a society in which everyone works together because they understand that it's in their mutual interest to do so.

** ''Literature/TheLittles'' by John Peterson is a series of children's books that's very similar to ''Literature/TheBorrowers'', although these small people have tails as well.

%%* The people in ''Literature/AliceInWonderland''
* ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' describes an alien race that travels across the galaxy to declare war on our planet. Due to an unfortunate size miscalculation, the alien fleet is eaten by a small dog.

* ''Anime/DoraemonNobitasLittleSpaceWar'' where an alien race are doll sized.

* The Invaders from ''Pinball/TheTwilightZone'', who are only slightly larger than a pinball.

* ''VideoGame/GourmetSentaiBarayaro'' have finger-sized enemies as recurring enemies, usually seen piloting robots to attack you. If you destroy their machines, they'll instead try leaping on you and perform a ColossusClimb to stomp on your head until you shake them away.

* ''WesternAnimation/StrawberryShortcake'': All iterations with the exception of the 2003 one depict Strawberry Shortcake and her friends as people of two to three strawberries in height.

* ''ComicBook/{{Micronauts}}'': Traditionally, visitors to Earth from the Microverse arrive here a few inches tall.

* The Fixies from ''WesternAnimation/TheFixies'' are extremely tiny creatures that live inside machines, appliances and other devices, maintaining and repairing them with the aid of their tool-filled pack-o-mats.

* The Leafmen and the Boggans from ''WesternAnimation/{{Epic}}''.

* The Psyches in ''Fanfic/EmpathTheLuckiestSmurf'' are basically [[TheStoic very stoic]] Caucasian-skinned Smurfs with head hair -- the 'three-apples-tall' fantasy version of ''Franchise/StarTrek'' Vulcans.

* NativeAmericanMythology: The Nimerigar were a race of little people from legends of the Shoshone; these people were said to inhabit the Rocky Mountains. In fact, the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Pedro_Mountains_Mummy San Pedro Mountains Mummy]] found in a cave in Carbon County, Wyoming brought more attention to these legends. Believers argue this mummy is the actual remains of a little person. Skeptics say these remains are either an anencephalic infant or just a hoax made by a taxidermist. At present, the mummy has disappeared with its current whereabouts unknown.

* Spinning off from the folk examples, the comic ''ComicBook/{{Fables}}'' has a town inhabited by actual Lilliputians who escaped the Homelands and joined up with other tiny folk heroes. They double as LilliputianWarriors, especially when mounted on rodents as the Mouse Patrol. The name of the new village they formed? Littletown. (Smallville got outvoted.)
* Franchise/{{Superman}}:
** People from the Bottled City of Kandor in the Superman mythos. Kandor was a Kryptonian city which was shrunk by Comicbook/{{Brainiac}} before Krypton's destruction. Superman managed to retrieve the city from Brainiac, and he and Comicbook/{{Supergirl}} spent most of the Silver and Bronze Ages looking for ways to re-enlarge Kandor and its inhabitants (they finally succeeded in a 1979 story).
** Pre-Crisis, Supergirl's parents and the remainder of the survivors of Argo City shrank and moved to Kandor after Kara rescued them from the [[PhantomZone Survival Zone]].

** In ''Comicbook/KryptonNoMore'', [[spoiler:they are so worried about Superman’s deteriorating mental stability that they talked Supergirl into convincing him that they did not exist for his own good]].
** In the Post-Crisis universe, the Kandorians and their shrunk city were reintroduced in the 00's.
* Comicbook/{{Supergirl}}: In several adventures of ''[[Comicbook/{{Supergirl 1972}} Supergirl's first series]]'' the eponymous heroine turns to the shrunk people of the Bottle City of Kandor to help her out. In issue #2 she enters Kandor to find a cure for her professor's brain malady. In issue #4 she asks a Kandorian surgeon for his brain-surgery equipment to cure a person who sustains a brain injury.
* ComicBook/TheSmurfs are consistently described as 'three apples tall' (the French way of saying they're 'knee-high to a grasshopper'). Gargamel can hold several in one hand as if they were a bunch of small action figures. In the comic book story "The Smurfs And The Pilus", however, Poet Smurf encounters humanoid beings that are even smaller than the Smurfs themselves, and on the cover of the story is even staked down by the Pilus ''Gulliver's Travels'' style.
* The tiny marker sniffers in ''ComicStrip/{{Dilbert}}'' used to be normal people, but then they were... [[IncrediblyLamePun downsized]].

* A ''ComicStrip/CalvinAndHobbes'' strip involves Spaceman Spiff landing on an alien planet, to find himself standing on tiny geometric farmland, and comes across a sprawling metropolis with skyscrapers an inch tall. This leads him to [[LampshadeHanging reflect]] that human size is by no means a standard for alien life... and of course, a blimp-sized monster appears to menace Spiff.
* ComicBook/MarvelComics' [[LilliputianWarriors Tim Boo Ba and his army]].

* Ryan Choi once had to contend with an incursion of alien beings whose entire civilization rested on the back of his dog as [[ComicBook/TheAtom The Atom]].
* Traditionally, visitors to Earth from the Microverse of the Comicbook/{{Micronauts}} arrive here a few inches tall.

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* The Psyches in ''Fanfic/EmpathTheLuckiestSmurf'' are basically [[TheStoic very stoic]] Caucasian-skinned Smurfs with head hair -- the 'three-apples-tall' fantasy version of ''Franchise/StarTrek'' Vulcans.

[[folder:Folklore]]
* These guys are pretty common folk heroes around the world: Thumbelina, Tom Thumb, Thumbling and the Japanese Issun-boshi were all said to be about the size of a [[MeaningfulName thumb]] ([[SarcasmMode who'd have guessed?]]).
* Others include Mal'chik s Pal'chik (Russia), Little Plum (China), Piñoncito (Chile), Cecino (Italy), and Ali g Icher (Algeria), which are all basically the same story under different names. And there are a whoooole lot more.
* Female versions are much rarer, but there are a few: Doll-i'-the-Grass (Denmark), Nàng Út (Vietnam), Maria como un Ajo (Spain), Finger-joint (Egypt), and a Cinderella figure named Ditu Migniulellu (Corsica).
* The Nimerigar were a race of little people from legends of the Shoshone; these people were said to inhabit the Rocky Mountains. In fact, the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Pedro_Mountains_Mummy San Pedro Mountains Mummy]] found in a cave in Carbon County, Wyoming brought more attention to these legends. Believers argue this mummy is the actual remains of a little person. Skeptics say these remains are either an anencephalic infant or just a hoax made by a taxidermist. At present, the mummy has disappeared with its current whereabouts unknown.
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* The Indian fantasy film ''Puli'' has the hero and two of his companions being captured by a village of tiny sprites, who are barely the height of their fingers, while trying to cross a forest. Upon learning of the heroes' mission being to stop a tyrannical queen, the sprites release them, and three of the sprites even tag along in the adventure... by hiding in the heroes' pockets.

* ''The Micronauts'' novel series by Gordon Williams (not to be confused with the toy line or comics of the same name). A group of miniturised clones created TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture as an experiment to deal with overpopulation who attempt to establish a working colony in the grounds of an estate.

* In one of the ''FlatStanley'' sequels, Stanley and his family travel to an alien planet very similar to Earth, but everyone's front lawn is approximately the size of a postage stamp.

* In the book ''Adventure in Legoland'' by Carol Matas, the Franchise/{{Lego}} people are like this when they come to life at night.

* The miniature warriors of ''The Lilliput Legion'', one of the novels of the Literature/TimeWars series.

* Spoofed in the short story ''Matter of Magnitude'' by Al Sevcik. Earth has a [[StarshipLuxurious mile-long battleship]] which it uses to enforce galactic peace, but it's forced to withdraw when it makes FirstContact with an alien race whose spaceship they can't detect -- it's only afterwards they realise that's because the alien spaceship is only an inch and a half long.

* Creator/JamesBlish, in the novella "Surface Tension," has microscopic humans, produced by genetic engineering. The physics is addressed very realistically, and the biology was not out of question when the story was written, but ScienceMarchesOn; their cells were the size of viruses, but we didn't know much about viruses, or a lot about cells for that matter, when the story was written.

* ''The Kitchen Warriors'' by Creator/JoanAiken is about a HiddenElfVillage in a china cupboard. There's also dishwasher kelpies, deep freeze trolls and a dragon in the furnace.

* ''The Amazing Adventures of Chilly Billy'' is about a tiny little man (and his equally small friends) who live in a refrigerator.

* The Fixies from ''The Fixies'' are extremely tiny creatures that live inside machines, appliances and other devices, maintaining and repairing them with the aid of their tool-filled pack-o-mats.

* ''The Lampies'' are tiny sprite-like creatures who live in a lamp post and look after the Lighting Network, all while antagonised by the equally as small Roons.

* In ''Film/Shorts'', the aliens Toby wishes for are these.

** ''Literature/TheLittles'' by John Peterson is a series of children's books that's very similar to ''Literature/TheBorrowers''.
* In the book ''Adventures in Legoland'', the Franchise/{{Lego}} people are like this when they come to life at night.

* The Indian fantasy film ''Puli'' has the hero and two of his companions being captured by a village of tiny sprites, humanoids barely the height of their fingers, while trying to cross a forest. Upon learning of the heroes' mission being to stop a tyrannical queen, the sprites releases them, and three of the sprites even tags along in the adventure... by hiding in the heroes' pockets.

* Octavius and Jedediah in ''Film/NightAtTheMuseum''. Also, their fellow Romans and Cowboys, respectively.
** The Mayan warriors from one of the other displays. But those guys are jerks, and never get let out of their case.

* The Leafmen and the Boggans from ''WesternAnimation/{{Epic}}'' .

** The first game's protagonist Captain Olimar, and by extension all of Hocotate's inhabitants, are only about 1.5 inches tall, about the size of a coin. The aforementioned Pikmin are no bigger; about 4 of them being needed to carry a small bottle cap. The enemies of the game are huge compared to Olimar and the Pikmin, but they're all either bugs or small animals that would be tiny to us.
** For ''Pikmin 3'', we're introduced to another planet of Lilliputian inhabitants named Koppai. They visit the Pikmin's planet (named PNF-404) to obtain the seeds of fruits (normal-sized to us but gigantic to them) to solve a food shortage crisis.
* ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'': Flabébé is the smallest {{mon}} known so far, only being four inches tall and a fifth of a pound.[[note]]Or 10 centimeters and 100 grams, depending on your units.[[/note]]

* Some ''Franchise/FinalFantasy'' games feature a spell effect called "mini" that shrinks a target down to fun size. The fifth installment even features a [[BlueMage Blue]] spell with this effect called "Lilliputian Lyric", and the fourth game contains a village inhabited by mini'd townsfolk.