The earliest film to have a shrunken person was a 1901 short The Dwarf and the Giant by Georges Méliès in which a character was split into two, with one growing in size and the other shrinking.
[1] James Luxford, writing for the British Film Institute, said, "Each era has used the scenario for very different purposes, in ways that often reflect the anxieties of the time."
"[2] Don Kaye, writing for Den of Geek!, said, "The 'shrinking person' genre got its start in the early ‘30s, with nearly each decade since then offering up its own variation on the theme.
Grantland's Claire L. Evans said in 2015, "The conceit, being inherently silly, was reframed as a vehicle for broad physical comedies and family movies."
She said, "These kinds of films reframe domestic life—a bowl of cereal, the family cat—as a cinematic landscape of awe and terror as exotic as anything on an alien world.