The Emoji Movie Review
PG: Some Rude Humor
Sony, Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures Animation
1 Hour and 26 Minutes (+ 5 Due to a Hotel Transylvania short that proceeds the film)
Voice Cast: T. J. Miller, James Corden, Anna Faris, Maya Rudolph, Steven Wright, Jennifer Coolidge, Jake T. Austin, Christina Aguilera, Sofia Vergara, Patrick Stewart
INTRO: The internet is a crazy place. Right when Sony Pictures Animation announced The Emoji Movie, the internet reacted in the way it should have reacted. "Really? What? Has Hollywood really run out of ideas?" I was with them at first, but then I saw the trailers. Though it didn’t look funny or anything, I gave it the benefit of the doubt that it didn’t look cheap. I felt like I was the only person who defended it because I have personally seen atrocious animated movies in my past. I looked the devil in its eyes and saw the movies he created such as Norm of the North, Ice Age: Collision Course, Hoodwinked Too, and The Nut Job (which is having a sequel in two weeks and nobody has paid attention to). I was ready to go in unbiased with low expectations, but then the movie began.
The Emoji Movie unlocks the never-before-seen secret world inside your smartphone. Hidden within the messaging app is Textopolis, a bustling city where all your favorite emojis live, hoping to be selected by the phone's user. In this world, each emoji has only one facial expression - except for Gene, an exuberant emoji who was born without a filter and is bursting with multiple expressions. Determined to become "normal" like the other emojis, Gene enlists the help of his handy best friend Hi-5 and the notorious code breaker emoji Jailbreak. Together, they embark on an epic "app-venture" through the apps on the phone, each its own wild and fun world, to find the Code that will fix Gene. But when a greater danger threatens the phone, the fate of all emojis depends on these three unlikely friends who must save their world before it's deleted forever.
THE GOOD: I will admit there is one thing I enjoyed. In the movie, there is a subplot that focuses on Gene’s parents, Mary and Mel Meh. They have a simple storyline where they look for their son around the phone when he runs away to search for his purpose. They have some of the most dramatic lines of dialogue, but their delivery is in the meh tone the entire way through. Their subplot is barely amusing for a while, but then it succumbs to the unfunny laziness that is demeaned by the script.
The only thing I like about their little storyline is a scene where the wife walks through a picture of their user’s Paris trip in the Instagram app, and she's transported to Paris where people are standing completely still since a photo is captured one shot.
That little set piece is the only creative thing The Emoji Movie has to offer. Other than that, congrats Sony Pictures Animation, you had employees who animated a film about emojis. You accepted the challenge tasked by your CEO and/or director, and you completed it.
The voice cast does a solid job with the “script” they’re presented with. T.J Miller’s voice performance is good and expresses a good range of emotion when he needs to. The man has a long history of voice acting with notable works such as Big Hero 6 and Gravity Falls, and he does a fine job leading a film with just his voice. The only person who stands out as a fun symbol is Maya Rudolph as Smiler who serves as the film’s antagonist. She’s not threatening or anything, but she puts a lot of effort into her vocal performance.
THE BAD: When Pixar pitched Inside Out the idea came from the thought, “what if we can give emotions that live in our heads consciousness and develop a personality based on that emotion?” That idea blossomed into an originally profound and emotional film about maturing in with imagination and heart.
With Sony Pictures (the cash cows of terrible films est. 2015), we have the idea of “what if we gave the emojis that live in our phones consciousness but don’t develop a personality at all?” AND THAT'S WHERE THE EMOJI MOVIE COMES IN!
Just to think a decade ago Sony Pictures Animation released their second animated feature, Surf’s Up which was nominated for an Oscar in the following year for Best Animated Feature. Where would the studio go a decade later? With the most creative ever: an entire 86 minute movie centered on emojis.
The movie immediately starts off so pretentious with Gene monologuing of how amazing phones are and how amazing technology it is. Though it is true how everyone is interconnected nowadays through social media, this movie puts it through words in soliloquy to introduce its world inside the phone.
I can’t compliment the worlds the animators created inside the phone because there is nothing impressive or imaginative about them. Outside of Instagram, every set piece is taken a page from either of the three movies named. There are three writers credited in the movie including director Tony Leondis (who directed the underrated animated film from 2008, Igor) and it feels like each writer was assigned to watch a given movie as a reference to complete the script.
The story has no inspiration or creativity as it plagiarizes the formula from other successful animated features such as Inside Out, The Lego Movie, and Wreck-It Ralph. But if that wasn’t it, the last act steals from Shrek. Out of all animated movies mentioned, it steals a huge element from Shrek. I can't explain why because it would spoil a twist from the film, but once you see it, you know what I'm talking about.
While copy and pasting elements that made those movies special, they forgot to add the most important thing any movie should have: character. They forgot to give these emoji characters actual character and personalities. These aren't characters; these emojis are all symbols. Not only are emojis actual symbols but in context to the movie, these characters are so one dimensional they might as well just be symbols. I refuse to call these symbols characters because they’re as one dimensional as they’re presented to be. For God's Sake, we follow an Emoji named Gene whose Emoji character is meh which is a word that originated from a made up word from The Simpsons and stumbled into an English dictionary.
You may ask, “What did you expect? These are emojis. Why would they have character?” Well, I would like to have some level of effort when developing fun loving characters. WB’s 2014 film The Lego Movie, set the bar for acquiring an accessible property and developing an impressive film that was moved with a fun set of characters that you can recognize just by an image. Those characters had so much personality that one of them had a spinoff film this year (The Lego Batman Movie) and it still maintained the creative charm and emotion that the first movie had. This film goes through every box in the checklist to fill a quota that you feel drained by the end. From the formula to the emotional beats, and to even give insult to injury, the obnoxious dance number to conclude the movie.
Those said films took time and effort to create their world, and you feel it while watching them. When we're in the games presented in Wreck-it Ralph, you saw the inspiration the animators had when developing those worlds. There was a nostalgic love and care for arcade gaming when we entered the consoles of Sugar Rush, Hero's Duty and Fix it Felix Jr. In The Lego Movie, we felt the animators' inspiration of the worlds based off of real life people young and old who created their own little worlds using Legos. Shoot, that was the entire meaning of the story for that movie. Here, you just have Emojis floating around in a typical regular city that is pretentiously played for manipulative whimsical purposes.
Outside of the voice cast, there isn’t any real theatrical value to this at all. It's honestly animated like a direct to DVD or straight to TV film. It has way too many cuts to black, fade in or fade out transitions that you expect a commercial would begin in between them. The humor whether it's physical or verbal is painfully unfunny. What does the humor rely on? Puns. The humor relies on lame and corny puns centered on the emoji the joke is played on or childish slang that will won't be cool anymore in three years. None of the jokes are funny. Shoot, some of the punchlines even linger for you to laugh and you just awkwardly cough. The only time it becomes hysterical it's for every wrong reason. With each cliche that is forced in, you laugh at the movie and not with it because of how poorly it's executed.
Right when we meet Jailbreak, a romance is immediately both rushed and forced between her and Gene. There are so many moments after where they stare into each other’s eyes, but you don’t care for it because of the lack of dimension behind either of them. They barely share any chemistry. One of the major scenes that occur which is supposed to blossom their relationship is when they’re reading an email their user was going to send to a girl he has a crush on and it is the lyrics to the chorus of Rihanna’s Diamonds, and they consider it as deep. If it were satirical like Sausage Party which mocked familiar and overused tropes in the animated film genre, then it would be rightfully funny, but here it's played for emotional resonance as if that there is the movie’s Oscar moment and you’re appalled. Right then and there you realize, “wow this movie is a joke!”
In some alternative universe, we all could've been watching the Genndy Tartakovsky Popeye movie that was supposed to come out instead of this, but God has forsaken us and left us with a fucking Emoji Movie instead. I don’t care about what that film could’ve been because I would’ve taken a mediocre Popeye film over this mainly because it was helmed by a director who understands animation and has been working in that field for a very long time. What’s even sadder is that a Hotel Transylvania short plays before this which we all know is made from Genndy Tartakovsky and you’re just there thinking.
When the Hotel Transylvania 3 prologue short that proceeds this is more charming, visually creative, and most of all FUNNIER than your 86 minute movie, you know you fucked up.
The Emoji Movie isn’t genuine or smart or have any emotion to it. Shit, its message of finding your identity is great is muddled under its terrible screenplay that has no identity at all. Honestly, this movie doesn’t even need words to describe how lazy it is so I’ll finish this review, to sum up, this entire film by using one emoji.
💩
LAST STATEMENT: Unfunny, unimaginative, and most of all as tasteless as you think it would be, The Emoji Movie is cinematic proof that Sony Pictures is all about the money than quality and should be held accountable for their idiotic action against cinema and all things animation
🖕🏾 this 🎥
Rating: 0.5/5 | 12%
Super Scene: Gene’s Glory Moment. (I’m not saying this because it's a great scene, but for the total opposite because it's followed by the most laughably terrible scene that is played as the resolution of the film)
