Lilliputians

"I perceived it to be a human creature not six inches high, with a bow and arrow in his hand, and a quiver at his back."

— Lemuel Gulliver, Gulliver's Travels

Little People — 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.

This may be the result of a shrink ray experiment gone wrong, but it's most likely the natural size of these beings, in which case they probably live in a Mouse World. Whatever the case, you can be assured that life for these guys is going to be tough, as every insect is a threat, every step up a staircase is a colossal climb, and no big person ever watches where they're stepping.

Lilliputian Warriors is a subtrope, for when these guys kick ass despite fitting in the palm of a hand. Certain members of The Fair Folk and House Fey may double as Liliputians, but those have their own pages. Regular-sized people who shrink down and then revert to normal size fall under Incredible Shrinking Man; this is for naturally small humanoids. Contrast Our Giants Are Bigger, to whom we are the Lilliputians.

Not to be confused with Liverpudlians.

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Examples of Lilliputians:

Advertising

• Snap, Crackle and Pop are elves that are only a few inches tall, thanks to having the ability of literally coming off of the cereal box in commercials. (There are commercials where they were portrayed as being several feet tall.) Guest characters Pow and Ms. Pink tower over the trio, yet still remain inches tall in height.

Anime and Manga

• Doraemon:
  • In one episode of the main Doraemon series, Doraemon and Nobita come 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 reappear in one of the movies, Doraemon: Nobita and the Kingdom of Clouds.
  • In Doraemon: Nobita's Little Space War, an alien race is doll-sized.
  • Doraemon: Nobita's Sky Utopia has a new character, Marimba the finger-sized little boy, who's small enough to sit on Doraemon's scalp, Head Pet-style.
• The ongoing Hakumei & Mikochi is about the namesake pair of lilliput girls, Hakumei and Mikochi, and their daily activities in a world where humans are typically about 9 centimetres (3.5 inches) tall and animals can talk.
• Nagisa and her brethren in My Monster Secret are basically Human Aliens, except they have a glowing antenna on their head and are a few inches tall. Because of this they use a Mobile-Suit Human version of themselves to interact with humanity.
• The dwarves in One Piece, tiny and cute people with long, pointy noses and foxlike tails. They are also insanely fast and powerful despite their size.
• Chara in Shugo Chara! sleep in eggs and hang out in a dollhouse while their humans are at school.
• In Super-Conductive Brains Parataxis, it turns out that the Surdlers, rather than being giant humanoids like the reader is initially lead to believe, are actually ordinary humans, while the apparently normal humans who enslave them are actually tiny transhumans.

Comic Books

• The Adventures of Peter Wheat: 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 Grand Wizard.
• The Atom:
  • In one of the Sword of the Atom minis from the 1980s, Ray Palmer comes across an alien race stranded on Earth who've been miniaturized by white dwarf star matter and lives with them for a while. This being a pulp fantasy style series, they have some Lilliputian Warriors mixed in.
  • Ryan Choi once has to contend with an incursion of alien beings whose entire civilization rests on the back of his dog.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In "Micro-Ducks from Outer Space" by Carl Barks (which inspired an episode of DuckTales (1987)), Scrooge McDuck has a run-in with miniature aliens seeking to trade for Earth goods.
• The inhabitants of Dimension X from Ed the Happy Clown by Chester Brown in his comic Yummy Fur, who look nothing like they do in this deliberately cheesy cover.
• Fables has a town inhabited by actual Lilliputians who escaped the Homelands and joined up with other tiny folk heroes. They double as Lilliputian Warriors, especially when mounted on rodents as the Mouse Patrol. The name of the new village they formed? Littletown. ("Smallville" got outvoted.)
• In Raymond Briggs' The Man, a 12-year-old boy has to look after a new house guest, a 7 inch high man.
• Micronauts (Marvel Comics): Traditionally, visitors to Earth from the Microverse arrive here a few inches tall.
• The Smurfs: 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.
• Superman:
  • People from the Bottled City of Kandor. Kandor was a Kryptonian city which was shrunk by Brainiac before Krypton's destruction. Superman managed to retrieve the city from Brainiac in The Super-Duel in Space, and he and Supergirl spent most of the Silver and Bronze Ages looking for ways to re-enlarge Kandor and its inhabitants (they finally succeed in 1979 Let My People Grow! story)
  • Pre-Crisis, Supergirl's parents shrank and moved to Kandor after Kara rescued them from the Survival Zone in The Untold Story of Argo City.
  • Whenever Kal and Kara wanted to visit the Kandorians they needed to shrink to go in the Bottle City.
  • In Krypton No More, 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 Superman: Brainiac.
  • In Supergirl (1972), Kara Zor-El often 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.
• In Tomahawk #102, Tomahawk and Big Anvil are captured by a tribe of Lilliputian Indians. They are turned loose after Tomahawk saves the life of the chief, and the tribes later saves the Rangers from a dinosaur. (Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.)
• One issue of Phil Foglio'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.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: Queen Atomia's slave "subjects" are all microscopically small humanoids, though they are 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 Shrink Ray and Mook Maker but are beyond even Amazon medicine's ability to turn back.

Comic Strips

• A Calvin and Hobbes 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 reflect that human size is by no means a standard for alien life... and of course, a blimp-sized monster appears to menace Spiff, as if to drive the point home.
• Dilbert: The tiny marker sniffers used to be normal people, but then they were... downsized.

Fairy Tales

• Franz Xaver von Schönwerth's "The Three Flowers": The wood sprite is so tiny that she uses thimbles for heating milk.
  The first night they watched a spark leap up from the hearth, and a tiny little woman began cooking milk in a thimble. The huntsmen forced the wood sprite to leave the hut.
• "Nine Bags Of Gold": Marie's elven friends live under her house's floorboards.
• These guys are pretty common folk heroes around the world: Thumbelina, Hop-o'-My-Thumb, Tom Thumb, Thumbling and the Japanese Issun-boshi were all said to be about the size of a thumb.
• Others include Mal'chik s Pal'chik (Russia), Little Plum (China), Pulgarcito (Spain), 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).

Fan Works

• Empath: The Luckiest Smurf: The Psyches are basically very stoic Caucasian-skinned Smurfs with head hair — the "three-apples-tall" fantasy version of Star Trek Vulcans.
• Star Wars: Galactic Folklore and Mythology:
  • Rodian myth tells of fairy-like beings called thumbfolk, as they're said to be the size of a Rodian's thumb.
  • There's an Ortolan folk figure named Tiny Tovya, who's described as only a few inches tall. She lives in her giant husband's navel and knits clothes from his lint.

Films — Animation

• In Tom and Jerry: Blast Off to Mars, the Martians are Little Green Men the size of Jerry the mouse.

Films — Live-Action

• In Bride of Frankenstein, Dr. Pretorius keeps a collection of tiny people created via his experiments in glass display jars.
• Flight of the Navigator: Several of the alien specimens in the starship are rather small: the size of a human finger or so.
• In Meet Dave, the eponymous "Dave" is a Mobile-Suit Human piloted by tiny Human Aliens who are plotting to steal all the salt from Earth's oceans.
• In Men in Black II, an entire colony lives in Kay's locker. Also subverted: Serleena's spaceship is shown to be tiny when it arrives on Earth, but then she shapeshifts into a normal-sized human.
• Octavius and Jedediah in Night at the Museum, 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 Phantom Planet: The Rhetons are humanoid but very small.
• 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.
• Willow: The brownies Willow and Madmartigan recruit are small enough to fit in their pockets. Two of them named Franjean and Rool tags along for Willow's quest, and at one point in the final battle the duo took cover from an advancing army by hiding inside a discarded helmet.

Literature

• In the book Adventure In Legoland by Carol Matas, the LEGO people are like this when they come to life at night.
• Mites, the characters from the Adventures of Dunno series, are a lilliputian people living in a Ghibli Hills-esque Mouse World (their cousins on the Moon live in a capitalist Wretched Hive).
• The Amazing Adventures Of Chilly Billy is about a tiny little man (and his equally small friends) who live in a refrigerator.
• Beren and Lúthien: In the earliest version of the history, elves were little enough to hide between shrubs and be threatened by cats. In the early stages of the Legendarium, J. R. R. Tolkien played with the idea that humans and elves were originally small, but as the ages went by, humans grew in stature whereas elves became fairy-sized. Nonetheless, Tolkien eventually dropped this concept, and even expressed disgust at the idea of the Fairy Folk being diminished.
• Bigfoot and Littlefoot: In "The Squatchicorns", Boone, Hugo, and Nogg discover that the "ghost" haunting Craggy Cavern was actually a Tommyknocker, which is presented here as a tiny human being with a white beard.
• In The Borrowers, the protagonists are small humans just a few inches tall who secretly live under the floorboards of a normal-sized human's house.
• The Carpet People and The Bromeliad by Terry Pratchett. The nomes in The Bromeliad actually follow the Square-Cube Law, unlike the Lilliputians, with the result that their lives and speech are both very, very fast by human standards.
• According to descriptions in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, adult Oompa-Loompas 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 Little People, however.
• 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.
• Dying Earth has the Twk-Men, who ride insects and exchange information for tiny measures of salt.
• In one of the Flat Stanley 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.
• The titular demon from the George and Azazel stories is two centimeters tall.
• Gulliver's Travels is the Trope Namer, giving us Lilliputians, said to be around six inches tall. They're so popular that "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.
• The Whos down in Whoville, only seen relative to each other (and the Grinch) in How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, but compared to the elephant main character in Horton Hears a Who!, their whole society is on a speck of dust.
• In Infinity Beach, 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 First Contact a decade before.
• The Kitchen Warriors by Joan Aiken is about a Hidden Elf Village in a china cupboard. There's also dishwasher kelpies, deep freeze trolls and a dragon in the furnace.
• The Littles is a series of children's books that's very similar to The Borrowers, although these small people have tails as well.
• Spoofed in the short story Matter Of Magnitude by Al Sevcik. Earth has a mile-long battleship which it uses to enforce galactic peace, but it's forced to withdraw when it makes First Contact with an alien race whose spaceship they can't detect — it's only afterwards that they realize that's because the alien spaceship is only an inch and a half long.
• The Micronauts novel series by Gordon Williams (not to be confused with the toy line or comics of the same name) centers on a group of miniaturized clones created 20 Minutes into the Future as an experiment to deal with overpopulation who attempt to establish a working colony in the grounds of an estate.
• Mistress Masham's Repose is essentially a Gulliver's Travels fanfiction centered on a girl who finds a group of Lilliputians who've taken refuge on her decaying ancestral estate.
• The Moomins: Jansson stated that the characters in her books are “the size of an upright phone book”. This is why The Hobgoblin appears to be so tall compared to everyone else, as he is the size of an average human.
• Aside from the occasional naturally small alien species, one prominent example in Perry Rhodan 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 hat is being talented engineers and technicians (especially in the area of miniaturization, of course), but several named Siganese characters definitely cross over into Lilliputian Warrior territory as well.
• Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures features a lost city of a species that fits. Said city — a veritable metropolis — is so small that it fits under a single leaf.
• the secret lives of Princesses: Princess Thimbelina, the size of a thumb, and her younger brother, Little Prince.
• James Blish's novella "Surface Tension" has microscopic humans produced by genetic engineering. The physics are addressed very realistically, and the biology was not out of question when the story was written, but Science Marches On; their cells are the size of viruses, but not much was known about viruses, or a lot about cells for that matter, when the story was written.
• The littlepeople Hem and Haw in Who Moved My Cheese?, a story about adapting to 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 Who Cut the Cheese? by Stilton Jarlsberg places them at six inches tall.
• Isaac Asimov's 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. In the end, it is revealed that the captives are the humans.

Live-Action TV

• The Collector: "The Miniaturist" revolves around mute lilliputians given to a miniature maker by the Devil, which he tries to raise in a society better than the one outside.
• Deadtime Stories: "Terror in Tiny Town" has figurines from a miniature town come to life to attack two boys.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "Planet of Giants", the First Doctor and his companions become these as a result of a TARDIS malfunction.
  • In "Let's Kill Hitler", the Eleventh Doctor encounters the Teselecta, a Mobile-Suit Human run by tiny Time Police.
• Kabouter Plop 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.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • Subverted in "The Invaders". 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 "The Little People", the astronaut Peter Craig discovers a race of tiny people no bigger than ants on another planet and immediately sets himself up as their god. Craig even compares them to the Lilliputians. He is later killed by a giant spaceman who picked him up and accidentally crushed him in his hand.
  • In "The Fear", Charlotte Scott and a highway patrolman named Robert Franklin are harassed by a 500-foot-tall alien monster. 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.

Myths & Religion

• Native American Mythology: 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 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.
• The korpokkur, rendered as koropokkuru in Japanese, are small people who leave gifts and help out humans in Ainu folklore. The word translates to "people underneath (the leaves of) the butterbur". They can be as tall as 120 cm or as tiny as 10 cm depending on the telling.

Music

• "Tiny Pants!" by The Aquabats! tells of a man's encounter with a tiny old man, and later an entire city of miniature people, who teach him an infectious song.
  Where the mountains meet the sky
  I met a very, very, very teeny guy
  Little coat and tiny pants
  And when he spoke to me, it made me dance

Pinball

• Bally's Playboy pinball and Data East's Playboy 35th Anniversary pinball feature images of the magazine's diminutive "Femlin" mascot all over the playfield.
• The Invaders from Twilight Zone, who are only slightly larger than a pinball.

Tabletop Games

• Exalted: The minikin were a crafted race in the First Age shaped from the already-diminutive Djala people and modified to grow no taller than two and a half feet, and were created to tend to and repair delicate machinery.
• Magic: The Gathering 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 Leviathan, generally among the most massive creatures in M:TG, is about the size of an elephant.
• The Small Folk are in fact Lilliputians hiding in the margins of the modern human world.

Theme Parks

• At Europa-Park (in Germany), an area and dark ride/rollercoaster are themed after Luc Besson's Arthur and the Invisibles. There are oversized plants and Big Creepy-Crawlies inside so guests of the park feel like they are the size of the book/film series' lilliputian protagonists.

Video Games

• You can visit the actual island of Lilliput in AdventureQuest. The Lilliputians help you fight a giant during that quest.
• The (unnamed) aliens from Chibi-Robo!, which are only about the size of the 4-inch-tall protagonist himself.
• Some Final Fantasy games feature a spell effect called "mini" that shrinks a target down to fun size. The fifth installment even features a Blue spell with this effect called "Lilliputian Lyric", and the fourth game contains a village inhabited by mini'd townsfolk. World of Final Fantasy features an entire race of small people known as Lilikins, which is an apparent portmanteau of Lilliputian and munchkin. Your playable characters can switch between this form and Jiant form.
• Gourmet Warriors has 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 Colossus Climb to stomp on your head until you shake them away.
• Insignificant 2019 has you playing as a person only three inches in height.
• Lilliput itself is a visitable location in Kingdom Hearts II as a part of Timeless River. None of the inhabitants appear concerned when their town gets caught up in, from their perception, a Behemoth Battle between a trio of toons and flying demons.
• Mr. Bones: Mr. Bones encounters a village of Lilliputians in a cave, which he must protect from being kidnapped by spiders.
• In NationStates Issue #29, "Minorities Demand Representation in TV Soaps", the nationality of the person in Option 1 is described as "Lilliputian".
• Pikmin:
  • The Hocotatians are only about 1.5 inches tall, about the size of a coin. The Pikmin are no bigger; about four 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.
  • Pikmin 3 introduces another planet of Lilliputian aliens 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.
  • Pikmin 4 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 a part of the same race of tiny beings that have colonized different planets.
• Pokémon: Flabébé is the smallest mon known so far, only being four inches tall and a fifth of a pound.^note Or ten centimeters and 100 grams, depending on your units.
• Torin's Passage: One layer of the world is filled with them. Torin needs to whisper when talking to them.
• Tomodachi Life: Miis are all but stated to be these in-game. Many newscasts show them in situations such as riding on leaves and bugs, floating in small baskets with balloons tied to them, getting stuck in pickle jars or cups of coffee, Squashed Flat in books or being ironed, and encountering giant humans and animals. One of their speech bubble phrases even asks the player how big they are in their world's metrics.
• Shinmyoumaru Sukuna, an Inchling, an implied descendannt of Issun-Boshi plays Big Bad in Touhou Kishinjou ~ Double Dealing Character. In truth, as a Horrible Judge of Character, she was pretty much suckered into the job, as only Inchlings can control the Miracle Mallet that kickstarts the plot.

Webcomics

• 7" Kara: Kara and her family are Lilliputians who live in a forgotten dollhouse in an abandoned shed in the backyard of a surburban home.
• Girl Genius: Susa is about a foot tall. Her "lab-sister" Gritha is a Giant Woman, and they both work for the Wulfenbach Empire. Their creator Dr. Quintus Varangius was obsessed with size.
• The Mowanians from The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! are a few inches tall and always wear Powered Armor is the general shape of whatever species they're currently engaged with. When dealing with or fighting Earthlings, they wear armor resembling omnious-but-little astronaut spacesuits. In their true form, they're harmless-looking little three-eyed furry creatures.

Web Original

• In Alfred's Playhouse Part 2, in the beginning of the video Alfred tells the audience that he secretly has "friends living inside my wall." Then, tons of little elf-like creatures climb all over Alfred, fondling him, vomiting on him, and defecating everywhere while Alfred laughs. For a full minute or so. And his laughter soon turns into a screaming meltdown. Yeah, these videos are absolutely chocked full of straight Nightmare Fuel, so watch at your own risk... to your sanity.
• Bosun's Journal: The bird herders were created through genetic engineering to be of much smaller size than normal in order to survive in the confines of the genetic research facility where they had been stranded after a nuclear explosion vented the rest of their habitat into space. A sexual preference for short partners has led to a gradual shrinking in their size over time — once the Bosun becomes aware of them, they're about 30 cm tall, as tall as a large rat is long, on average, and still shrinking. This is a problem, since a small body can only support so complex a brain; as they keep shrinking, the bird herders begin to steadily decrease in intellect and eventually become wholly nonsapient gecko-like animals.
• Orion's Arm: The artificial 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.

Western Animation

• The Biskitts are, as their opening claims, the smallest dogs in the world.
• Danger Mouse: In one episode, the titular character finds himself surrounded by massive alien battleships out to conquer Earth... until they show themselves and turn out to be tiny. They call off the invasion after learning that most Earthlings are much bigger than DM.
• DuckTales (2017): In the episode “The Most Dangerous Game… Night,” Gyro discovers a race of tiny people living in McDuck manor which he names “Gyroputians.”
• 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 Flintstones: The Great Gazoo is an alien the size of a human baby, which when interacting with humans he compensates by floating. He was banned from the planet Zetox for endangering all and sentenced to help out whoever he encountered first, which happened to be Fred and Barney.
• Futurama: In "Godfellas", Bender gets lost in space and is struck by a meteor which becomes embedded in his body. A species of tiny humanoids, the Shrimpkins, build a civilization there and worship Bender as a god.
• George Shrinks is about the adventures of the titular three-inch-tall ten-year-old boy. The cartoon series never explains why he's so tiny, but in the book it was based on, he dreamed that he was three inches tall and woke up to find he actually was.
• Gravity Falls:
  • The gnomes are about a foot and a half tall, judging by the fact that three of them stacked on top of each other roughly equal one twelve-year-old.
  • The Lilliputtians^note They even lampshade that "The name makes more sense written down." from "The Golf War" are little golf ball-headed folk who live and work behind the scenes at the Royal Discount Putt Hutt.
• Elves in Hilda are only about two inches tall. They avoid being noticed or trodden on by bigger folk by being Invisible to Normals; the only way to see or physically interact with an elf and its home is by signing a contract with them.
• Jimmy Two-Shoes actually has two named races: the Gnomans and the Racing Bugs. There are also several other citizens of Miseryville like this. Dorkus is even smaller than Heloise.
• Krypto the Superdog: One episode features a couple of tiny aliens.
• 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.
• Love, Death & Robots: In "Ice Age", a refrigerator's icebox is home to a civilization (at least one city; the presence of additional areas is hinted by a nuclear war but never shown) of minuscule people and accompanying wildlife, scaled so that a mammoth is the size of an insect. They also experience time very quickly, going through a full recap of past and future human history over about a day. The medieval stage shows them as "mining" a pile of frozen Brussel sprouts for food, lifting them off one a time with a wooden cranes.
• Men in Black: The Series: 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 lifelike, human-size robotic suits.
• Mighty Max: One episode starts with reports of a swarm of beetles ruining a small village. Turns out they are actually tiny alien scouts, clearing the area for one of their diplomatic ships to land. Hey, the aliens left a note saying they would come back later (it's in a language no one alive can read, of course.) The aliens want Earth's toxic and radioactive waste; it's apparently an extremely valuable commodity where they come from. Win-win for Earth, Max, and the aliens.
• My Life as a Teenage Robot: The Minutians of "Party Machine" are tiny aliens that multiply ten-fold when smashed. This would make them invincible if not for the bizarre predictability with which they try to conquer Earth. Dr. Wakeman always awaits them with the Contention Unity SX, essentially a vacuum cleaner.
• The Paw Paw Bears are this: tiny bears slightly less tall than a dandelion.
• Popeye's Travels, from the Brodax era, was a retelling of the Swift tale with Popeye coming between Lilliput and Blefescu in their war.
• The Ruff & Reddy Show: The final story arc has the heroes on a planet populated by tiny creatures called Lillipunis who are terrorized by a creature called a "Blop". Ruff and Reddy defeat the Blop and earn the respect of the Lillipunis who help them return to Earth.
• The Simpsons: In the "Treehouse of Horror VII" story "The Genesis Tub", 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.
• The Smoggies: The Suntots are humanoids who are much smaller than the titular Smoggies.
• The Smurfs (1981): The Smurfs themselves are only about three inches tall. Exaggerated by the Viking-like Uphorns and Downhorns in "Big Shot Smurfs", who are as small as a Smurf's toe.
• Solar Opposites: The residents of the Wall are humans shrunk down by Yumyulack and Jesse and trapped inside a large wall-spanning ant farm.
• South Park: In "Simpsons Already Did It", the boys create intelligent life in an aquarium by mixing brine shrimp (sea people) with human semen (sea men). Butters points out that The Simpsons already did it.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Although the series takes place in an underwater world, Plankton, the show's main villain, is much smaller than the show's other characters. While 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.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In "Nomad Droids", the Pattitites are minuscule humanoids small enough to fit in a human-sized being's hand, and who tie down R2 and 3PO in a manner very reminiscent of Gulliver's Travels.
• Strawberry Shortcake: All iterations with the exceptions of the 2003 and 2021 versions depict Strawberry Shortcake and her friends as people of two-to-three strawberries in height.
• ThunderCats (2011) 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 Productions' Tom of T.H.U.M.B. and its Hanna-Barbera expy Inch High, Private Eye.
• Team Umizoomi could be considered a team of Lilliputians. Bot is a non-"human" example.
• What A Cartoon! Show: "Snoot's New Squat" involves a miniature alien looking for a new home for his people to colonize, and settling on the body of a neurotic anthropomorphic dog named Al... who initially mistakes Snoot for an infestation of fleas.
• The World of David the Gnome: Justified in that, well, they're gnomes.

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