History Main / Lilliputians

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* ''WesternAnimation/TomAndJerry'': In ''Tom & Jerry Blast Off to Mars'', the Martians are LittleGreenMen the size of Jerry the mouse.

%%* ''Film/{{Willow}}'': The brownies.

* These guys are pretty common folk heroes around the world: Literature/{{Thumbelina}}, Literature/HopOMyThumb, Tom Thumb, Thumbling and the Japanese Issun-boshi were all said to be about the size of a thumb.

* Lindsay Gutteridge's ''Cold War in a Country Garden'' describes the troubles of a spy whose first mission, after being shrunk to Lilliputian size, is to survive in his own garden -- before being sent behind the Iron Curtain.

** {{Subverted|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E51TheInvaders The Invaders]]". [[spoiler:It appears for most of the episode that the invaders belong to a race of tiny aliens but it turns out that they are normal sized humans in a world of giants.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E93TheLittlePeople The Little People]]", the astronaut Peter Craig discovers a race of tiny people no bigger than ants on another planet and [[AGodAmI immediately sets himself up as their god]]. [[LampshadeHanging Craig even compares them to the Lilliputians]]. [[spoiler:He is later killed by a giant spaceman who picked him up and accidentally crushed him in his hand.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E155TheFear The Fear]]", Charlotte Scott and a highway patrolman named Robert Franklin are harassed by a 500-foot-tall alien monster. [[spoiler:It turns out that the monster is a giant balloon being controlled by two very small aliens. They soon leave Earth to avoid being crushed by the "giant" humans. As they leave, Robert tells Charlotte that he wishes them luck and expresses the hope that they will be the giants on the next planet that they land on.]]

* ''WebOriginal/OrionsArm'': The artificial [[http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/47f42fd2915ba Clade Nisse]] is actually an exploration of the trope, describing the difficulties in packing a sapient ("sophont") intelligence in such a small head and addressing the difficulties in keeping in body heat. They're 30 cm. tall on average.

* ''WesternAnimation/SpongeBobSquarePants'': 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. While [[YourSizeMayVary his size is somewhat inconsistent]], he is usually portrayed as being about the size of a bug from the other characters’ perspectives. It shouldn’t be surprising that he gets stepped on a lot.

* ''WesternAnimation/ThunderCats2011'' has the plant-based Petalars from the episode "Song of the Petalars". They're 20 centimeters tops, age rapidly, and they're light enough to be carried on the winds. In the episode, a group that was blown away from their home, the Garden, to Briar Wood are trying to get back. When the woods are burned down, the updraft gives them a chance to return.

** ''VideoGame/Pikmin4'' features lots of castaways from about a dozen or so different planets who ended up on PNF-404 after receiving Olimar's distress signal at the beginning of the game. This suggests that Hocotatians, Koppaites and the rest are all apart of the same race of tiny beings that have colonized different planets.

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%%* ''Anime/{{Arrietty}}'': The Borrowers.
* ''Manga/{{Doraemon}}'':
** The main series have an episode where Doraemon and Nobita comes across Donjara village, a hidden population of little people (How little? They use a ''frog'' as a steed, for starters) who's seeking a new home due to deforestation wiping out their home village. Nobita and Doraemon helps them relocate, and the little people reappears in one of the movies, ''Anime/DoraemonNobitaAndTheKingdomOfClouds''.
** ''Anime/DoraemonNobitasLittleSpaceWar'' where an alien race are doll sized.
** ''Anime/DoraemonNobitasSkyUtopia'' has new character, Marimba the finger-sized little boy who's small enough to sit on Doraemon's scalp, HeadPet-style.

* ''Anime/TheLittlBits'', a children's anime series from 1980, shown stateside on {{Creator/Nickelodeon}}.
* Nagisa and her brethren in ''Manga/MyMonsterSecret'' are basically {{Human Alien}}s, except they have a glowing antenna on their head and are a few inches tall. Because of this they use a MobileSuitHuman version of themselves to interact with humanity.
* The dwarves in ''Manga/OnePiece'', tiny and cute people with long pointy noses, and fox-like tails. They are also insanely fast and powerful despite their size.

* The''Franchise/MarvelUniverse'''s [[LilliputianWarriors Tim Boo Ba and his army]].

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

[[folder:Film]]
%%* ''Film/{{Willow}}'': The brownies.

* 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, but then she shapeshifts into a normal-sized human.
* In Eddie Murphy's ''Film/MeetDave'', the eponymous "Dave" is a MobileSuitHuman piloted by tiny HumanAliens who are plotting to steal all the salt from Earth's oceans.
* ''Film/FlightOfTheNavigator''. Several of the alien specimens in the starship are rather small: the size of a human finger or so.
* ''Film/{{Critters}}'' - until they eat enough, that is!
* The stitchpunks in the short film and movie of ''WesternAnimation/{{Nine}}''.
* Octavius and Jedediah in ''Film/NightAtTheMuseum'', along with their fellow Romans and cowboys, respectively. There's also the Mayan warriors from one of the other displays. But those guys are hostile to Larry, and never get let out of their case.
* The Leafmen and the Boggans from ''WesternAnimation/Epic2013''.
* In ''Film/BrideOfFrankenstein'', Dr. Pretorius keeps a collection of tiny people created via his experiments in glass display jars.
* In ''Film/{{Shorts}}'', the aliens Toby wishes for are these.
* The inhabitants of Szuflandia in ''Film/{{Kingsajz}}'', whose ancestors used to be HouseFey.

* 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.
* In ''Literature/TheBorrowers'', the protagonists are small humans just a few inches tall, who secretly live under the floorboards of a normal-sized human's house.
* ''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.
* In the book ''Literature/AdventureInLegoland'' by Creator/CarolMatas, the Franchise/{{Lego}} people are like this when they come to life at night.
* ''Literature/MistressMashamsRepose'' by T.H. White is essentially a piece of ''Gulliver's Travels'' fanfic centered on a girl who finds a group of Lilliputians who've taken refuge on her decaying ancestral estate.
* ''Literature/TheCarpetPeople'' and ''[[Literature/NomesTrilogy The Bromeliad]]'' by Creator/TerryPratchett.
** The nomes in ''The Bromeliad'' actually follow the square:cube rule, unlike the Lilliputians, with the result their lives and speech are both very, very fast by human standards.
* ''Literature/TheMicronauts'' 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.
* ''Literature/TheSecretLivesOfPrincesses'': Princess Thimbelina, the size of a thumb, and her younger brother, Little Prince.
* The miniature warriors of ''Literature/TheLilliputLegion'', one of the novels of the Literature/TimeWars series.
* ''Literature/StuartLittle'' meets one of these in the book.
%%* ''Literature/AliceInWonderland'': The people.

* ''Literature/InfinityBeach'', a 2000 science fiction novel by Creator/JackMcDevitt. The protagonist only realizes halfway through the novel that a 'model' spaceship is (unknown to its owner) a real spaceship brought back from an unsuccessful FirstContact a decade before.
* The Creator/IsaacAsimov short story ''Youth'' has two boys capturing a couple of small aliens in the belief that they're unusual animals. Fortunately the aliens are smart enough to realize that harming the children would be a bad idea, so they just wait for the boys' parents to discover them. [[spoiler:In the end, it is [[TomatoSurprise revealed]] the captives are the humans.]]
* Spoofed in the short story ''Literature/MatterOfMagnitude'' 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.
* ''Literature/RumoAndHisMiraculousAdventures'' features a lost city of a species that fits. Said city - a veritable metropolis - is so small it fits under a single leaf.
* Lindsay Gutteridge's ''Cold War in a Country Garden'' describes the troubles of a spy whose first mission, after being shrunk to Lilliputian size, is to survive in his own garden - before being sent behind the Iron Curtain.

* Mites, the characters from Nikolai Nosov's ''Literature/AdventuresOfDunno'' series of Soviet children's books are a lilliputian people living in a GhibliHills-esque MouseWorld (that's Earth mites. Mites from the Moon live in a capitalist WretchedHive).
* Creator/JamesBlish, in the novella "Literature/SurfaceTension," 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.
* Aside from the occasional naturally small ''alien'' species, one prominent example in ''Literature/PerryRhodan'' is the quite human colony world Siga -- whose inhabitants shrunk over successive generations due to a strange mutagenic component of their green (!) sun's hyperdimensional spectrum all the way down to only several inches tall. Their traditional in-series [[PlanetOfHats hat]] is being talented engineers and technicians (especially in the area of miniaturization, of course), but several named Siganese characters definitely cross over into [[LilliputianWarriors Lilliputian Warrior]] territory as well.
* The littlepeople Hem and Haw in ''Literature/WhoMovedMyCheese'', a story about adapting to [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks change]], are as small as the mice Sniff and Scurry.
** Also the "teeny people", "punypeople", and "loyal employees" in parodies. The "About the Author" page in ''Literature/WhoCutTheCheese'' by Stilton Jarlsberg places them at six inches tall.
* Adult Oompa-Loompas, according to Roald Dahl's descriptions in ''Literature/CharlieAndTheChocolateFactory'', come up to about Willy Wonka's knee. Children are "no more than four inches high"! Adaptations usually go with the stature of real life LittlePeople, however.

* The titular demon from Creator/IsaacAsimov's ''Literature/GeorgeAndAzazel'' stories is two centimeters tall.
* ''Literature/TheAmazingAdventuresOfChillyBilly'' is about a tiny little man (and his equally small friends) who live in a refrigerator.

* ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959'':
** {{Subverted|Trope}} in "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E51TheInvaders The Invaders]]". [[spoiler:It appears for most of the episode that the invaders belong to a race of tiny aliens but it turns out that they are normal sized humans in a world of giants.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E93TheLittlePeople The Little People]]", the astronaut Peter Craig discovers a race of tiny people no bigger than ants on another planet and [[AGodAmI immediately sets himself up as their god]]. [[LampshadeHanging Craig even compares them to the Lilliputians]]. [[spoiler:He is later killed by a giant spaceman who picked him up and accidentally crushed him in his hand.]]
** In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E155TheFear The Fear]]", Charlotte Scott and a highway patrolman named Robert Franklin are harassed by a 500 foot tall alien monster. [[spoiler:It turns out that the monster is a giant balloon being controlled by two very small aliens. They soon leave Earth to avoid being crushed by the "giant" humans. As they leave, Robert tells Charlotte that he wishes them luck and expresses the hope that they will be the giants on the next planet that they land on.]]

* Belgian TV Series ''Series/KabouterPlop'' by Creator/Studio100 is centered around a group of gnomes who are the size of a mouse. In some TV Specials and movies, the main characters are seen interacting with humans.
* Creator/SidAndMartyKrofftProductions gave us ''Dr. Shrinker''.
* ''Series/TheCollector'': "The Miniaturist" revolves around mute lilliputians given to a miniature maker [[DealWithTheDevil by the Devil]], which he tries to raise in a society better than the one outside.
* ''Series/DeadtimeStories'': "Terror in Tiny Town" has figurines from a miniature town come to life to attack two boys.

* Creator/{{Bally}}'s ''[[Pinball/PlayboyBally Playboy]]'' pinball and Creator/DataEast's ''[[Pinball/Playboy35thAnniversary Playboy 35th Anniversary]]'' pinball feature images of the magazine's diminutive "Femlin" mascot all over the playfield.

* ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'' has the plane of Segovia. Everything there is about 1/100 of the size of other planes. For example, it has whales the size of goldfish and its [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Discussion.aspx?multiverseid=14538 Leviathan]], generally among the most massive creatures in ''M:TG'', is about the size of an elephant.

* The (unnamed) aliens from ''VideoGame/ChibiRobo'', which are only about the size of the protagonist himself.

* ''VideoGame/GourmetWarriors'' 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.

* VideoGame/MrBones: Mr. Bones encounters a village of Lilliputians in a cave, which he must protect from being kidnapped by spiders.
* In ''VideoGame/{{NationStates}}'' Issue #29 "Minorities Demand Representation In TV Soaps", the nationality of the person in Option 1 is described as "Lilliputian".
* ''VideoGame/{{Pikmin}}''.

** The gnomes are about a foot and a half tall, judging by the fact that [[spoiler:three of them stacked on top of each other roughly equal one twelve year old]].

* ''WesternAnimation/MenInBlack'': The Arquilians and the Fmeks are two alien races of very small size. As in, so small that they disguise themselves among Earthlings by piloting [[MobileSuitHuman lifelike, human-size robotic suits]].

* ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'': In "The Genesis Tub", a ''Treehouse of Horror'' episode, Lisa accidentally creates life when the tooth she soaks in cola gets zapped by electricity. The resulting highly intelligent lifeforms are the size of bacteria and live inside a petri dish.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheSmurfs'': The Smurfs themselves are only about three inches tall. Exaggerated by the [[HornyVikings Viking-like]] Uphorns and Downhorns in "Big Shot Smurfs", who are as small as a Smurf's toe.

* ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'': In "Simpsons Already Did It", the boys create intelligent life in an aquarium by [[SeaAping mixing brine shrimp (sea people) with human semen (sea men)]]. Butters [[LampshadeHanging points out that]] [[ItsBeenDone the Simpsons already did it]].

* ''WesternAnimation/Thundercats2011'' has the plant-based Petalars from the episode "Song of the Petalars". They're 20 centimeters tops, age rapidly, and they're light enough to be carried on the winds. In the episode, a group that was blown away from their home, the Garden, to Briar Wood are trying to get back. When the woods are burned down, the updraft gives them a chance to return.

* A pair of Lilliputian-sized detectives -- Rankin-Bass' ''Tom of T.H.U.M.B.'' and its Hanna-Barbera expy ''WesternAnimation/InchHighPrivateEye.''

* 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.

* ''WesternAnimation/SpongeBobSquarePants'': 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, he is usually portrayed as being about the size of a bug from the other characters’ perspectives. It shouldn’t be surprising that he gets stepped on a lot.

LittlePeople-- ''really'' little people. Lilliputians are humanoid characters whose main characteristic is that they are very, very small. Like, up to your knee small. Size of your thumb small. Size of an ''ant'' small.

* ''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.)

* ''ComicBook/TheSmurfs'': The titular characters 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 inhabitants of Dimension X from ''ComicBook/EdTheHappyClown'' by Chester Brown in his comic ''Yummy Fur'', who look nothing like they do in [[http://www.milehighcomics.com/cgi-bin/backissue.cgi?action=fullsize&issue=99631091456%207 this deliberately cheesy cover.]]
* ''Franchise/MarvelUniverse'''s [[LilliputianWarriors Tim Boo Ba and his army]].
* In the ''[[ComicBook/TheAtom Sword of the Atom]]'' minis from the '80s, Ray Palmer came across an alien race stranded on Earth who'd been miniaturised by [[AppliedPhlebotinum white dwarf star matter]], and lived with them for a while. This being a pulp fantasy style series, they had some LilliputianWarriors mixed in.
* One issue of Creator/PhilFoglio's ''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.

* ''Franchise/WonderWoman'' [[ComicBook/WonderWoman1942 Vol 1]]: Queen Atomia's slave "subjects" are all microscopically small humanoids, though they nearly robotic and do little beyond following their "queen"'s orders. They were all presumably human before being subjected to the "royal" {{Mad Scientist}}'s ShrinkRay and MookMaker but are beyond even Amazon medicine's ability to turn back.
* ''ComicBook/TheAtom'': Ryan Choi once had to contend with an incursion of alien beings whose entire civilization rested on the back of his dog.
* ''ComicBook/{{Micronauts|MarvelComics}}'': Traditionally, visitors to Earth from the Microverse arrive here a few inches tall.

* ''Series/TheOuterLimits1963'' episodes "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1963S1E9CorpusEarthling Corpus Earthling]]", "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1963S1E14TheZantiMisfits The Zanti Misfits]]", "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1963S1E17DontOpenTillDoomsday Don't Open Till Doomsday]]", and "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1963S1E19TheInvisibles The Invisibles]]".

* ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'': The aliens in "[[Recap/StarTrekS2E7Catspaw Catspaw]]" only look human because of their transmuter. Without it, they're very tiny, and very alien. Also "[[Recap/StarTrekS2E15TheTroubleWithTribbles The Trouble with Tribbles]]", and "[[Recap/StarTrekS3E5IsThereInTruthNoBeauty Is There in Truth No Beauty?]]" (Medusans).

* [[http://www.drowtales.com/mainarchive.php?id=1245 Fairies]] in ''Webcomic/{{Drowtales}}''.
* ''Webcomic/LeifAndThorn'' has [[http://leifandthorn.com/comic/landslide-bring-me-down-775/ the doll-size Tamaputians]].
* Kara and her family are Lilliputians who live in a forgotten dollhouse in an abandoned shed in the backyard of a surburban home. [[http://www.7inchkara.com/ 7" Kara]]
* Susa of ''Webcomic/GirlGenius'' is about a foot tall. Her "lab-sister" Gritha is a GiantWoman, and they both work for the Wulfenbach Empire. Their creator Dr. Quintus Varangius was obsessed with size.

* ''ComicBook/PeterWheat'': The protagonist of the comic, Peter Wheat, is a human boy no bigger than a bug. He spends his days defending the Wheat Kingdom from threats like the Hornet Queen and the Beetle Wizard.

* ''WebOriginal/OrionsArm'': The artificial [[http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/47f42fd2915ba Clade Nisse]] is actually a straight example and a deconstruction of the trope, describing the difficulties in packing a sapient ('sophont') intelligence in such a small head and addressing the difficulties in keeping in body heat. They're 30 cm. tall on average.
* The inhabitants of the city beneath lane five of the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex in ''Podcast/WelcomeToNightVale''.

* ''Series/TheOuterLimits1963'' episodes "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1963S1E9CorpusEarthling Corpus Earthling]]" "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1963S1E14TheZantiMisfits The Zanti Misfits]]", "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1963S1E17DontOpenTillDoomsday Don't Open Till Doomsday]]", and "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1963S1E19TheInvisibles The Invisibles]]".

* ''Series/TheOuterLimits1963'' episodes "The Zanti Misfits", "The Invisibles", "Don't Open Till Doomsday", "Corpus Earthling".

* ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries''. The aliens in "Catspaw" only look human because of their transmuter. Without it, they're very tiny, and very alien. Also "The Trouble With Tribbles", and "Is There In Truth No Beauty" (Medusans).

* ''WebOriginal/OrionsArm'': The artificial [[http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/47f42fd2915ba Clade Nisse]] is actually a straight example and a deconstruction of the trope, describing the difficulties in packing a sapient('sophont') intelligence in such a small head and addressing the difficulties in keeping in body heat. They're 30cm tall on average.

* ''WesternAnimation/SpongeBobSquarePants'': 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, 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'': 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, 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. Although his size is somewhat inconsistent, 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.