In 1699, Dr Lemuel Gulliver, Kerwin Mathews, is an English physician who seeks riches and adventure as a ship's doctor on a voyage around the world. His fiancée Elizabeth, June Thorburn, longs for him to settle down, and she secretly stows away aboard the ship to stay close. A fierce storm sweeps them off course, and Gulliver is carried overboard.
Gulliver washes ashore on a land called Lilliput, a realm of tiny humans with a culture echoing the Middle East. The locals fear the newcomer, viewing him as a giant and tying him down with stakes to the beach, yet he eases their fears through acts of kindness and patient restraint. His goodwill wins the trust of the Emperor of Lilliput, while it stirs the ire and envy of the Finance Minister Flimnap, who resents the outsider’s influence.
Interior Minister Reldresal, Lee Patterson, has his own schemes—he hopes to marry Gwendolyn, who, along with her banished father, was once exiled for rebellion against the emperor. Reldresal and Flimnap spar to secure the role of prime minister, and Gulliver lends a hand by foiling Flimnap’s assassins and aiding Reldresal. When Flimnap exposes Reldresal’s help for Gwendolyn and her father, Lord Bermogg, the two banished figures, the result is swift arrest.
Gulliver frees Reldresal from the tower and reunites him with Gwendolyn. From them he learns the backstory behind Bermogg’s banishment and the broader conflict between Lilliput and Blefuscu, a neighboring island. The two nations squabble over a petty question—which end of an egg should be broken—fueling a war that Gulliver tries to halt by taking control of Blefuscu’s warships.
The emperor grows furious when Gulliver refuses to destroy Blefuscu and becomes increasingly jealous of the new celebrity washing over the court. A wildfire, started during a palace celebration, endangers everyone; Gulliver douses the flames with wine, but his clumsy rescue ruins the empress’s dress. The sequence gives the emperor the pretext to remove him. Gulliver rebukes the emperor for how war, pride, and vanity ruin people’s lives and relationships, and he rejects Reldresal’s plan to impose his own rigid ideals, arguing that such rule would mirror tyranny. When ordered to be executed, Gulliver escapes in a boat he had built earlier and sets sail for freedom.
He reaches a vast isle called Brobdingnag, not realizing it is inhabited by giants. A virtuous 40-foot girl named Glumdalclitch finds Gulliver and carries him to the castle of King Brob. The king has a curious collection of “tiny animals” and even brings Elizabeth, who had been shipwrecked, to the same palace. Gulliver and Elizabeth are placed in a dollhouse-like setting while Glumdalclitch tends to them.
The king marries Gulliver and Elizabeth, and the newlyweds venture outside to celebrate. A giant squirrel drags Gulliver into a burrow, but Glumdalclitch intervenes and rescues him by pulling him free with her hair. Gulliver then defeats the king at chess and cures the queen’s stomachache, but Prime Minister Makovan, Charles Lloyd Pack, accuses him of witchcraft. Gulliver attempts to explain scientific ideas, yet the court reads his explanations as sorcery. He is forced to say what the king wants to hear to save himself and Elizabeth, only to discover the king’s deceit and to denounce his ignorance and prejudice.
The enraged king orders Gulliver’s crocodile, but Gulliver slays the creature with a brooch shaped like a sword. The king has him burned, but Glumdalclitch saves them once more by placing Gulliver and Elizabeth in her sewing basket and dumping it into a nearby brook that empties into the sea.
Gulliver and Elizabeth awaken on a beach close to home in England. Elizabeth asks whether all of it was real or a dream, and Gulliver, now ready to settle down, insists that the true flaws reside within every people, not just one nation. When Elizabeth asks about Glumdalclitch, Gulliver offers a knowing smile and suggests that she, too, may be born in time, hinting at the enduring possibility of compassion and courage in the world.
