Director: Tony Leondis
Distributor: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Duration: 86 minutes
The Emoji Movie (Blu-ray) – Movie Review
You know you’re getting old when the difference between Emoticons and Emojis isn’t completely obvious. Having to look up the meaning behind the title to make sure you aren’t missing out on crucial information doesn’t help the viewer from feeling like a social pariah who’s been living under a rock for the last decade. At first the two were treated as interchangeable terms, but that is no longer the case. There’s even been a lawsuit about it apparently. To clarify it for the laymen among you, an emoticon is a typographical display of a facial representation, used to convey emotion in a text only medium, while Emoji are actual pictures. The translation of the word has its roots in the Japanese language and translates to pictograph, more or less.
With that out of the way, viewing ‘The Emoji Movie’ has become somewhat easier. Sure enough the difference is explained in it, but it’s only in passing and really briefly, the emoticons are shown off as the elderly in ‘Textopolis’. This is where the movie takes place.
Gene (T.J. Miller) is an emoji that’s supposed to be ‘meh’, not the insult, the actual ‘meh’ emoji. He and his parents Mel (Steven Wright) and Mary (Jennifer Coolidge) live in Textopolis. It’s where the best of the best emoji’s get scanned and their liking gets sent to the screen, so Alex (Jake T. Austin) –the user of the phone- can communicate with this friends via text messaging without using too many words. So far so good.
Every emoji has his or her personality, there is however one caveat, that’s that every emoji acts like their emotion, all the time. Kitten got run over? Still gotta laugh, if you are a happy one. Just nominated for president? Still gotta cry if you are a crying emoji. Gene, however, is a bit of an oddball, he doesn’t really fit the criteria as he isn’t ‘meh’ all the time. Bad things happen and before long he’s labelled a ‘defect’, so he has two choices, either stay and die or elope and find Jailbreak (Anna Farris), so she can recode him into a pure ‘meh’. Gene is helped in his quest by Hi-5 (James Corden).
The plot of ‘The Emoji Movie’ has been done to death. That doesn’t mean that it can’t have been done before and still entertain, but that’s not the case in this movie. Not even close.
There are several reasons why the movie misses its mark so completely. At first there’s the lack of context for those who aren’t in the know -those who aren’t up to the ever evolving internet lingo, which is anyone over the age of twenty. Then there’s the rather crude childish jokes that aren’t meant for those who are in ‘the sweet spot of age’ which are the fourteen to eighteen-year-olds, who will not find the puns and quips funny at all. So anyone over twenty will be annoyed at the premise and the rather deus ex machina ending while anyone who’s younger will be cringing because the producers were too busy cramming in as many ‘cool and hip’ things -like ‘Just Dance’; cat memes; Spotify or Candy Crush- that are relevant to this day and age. This also doesn’t help the movie age well. Anyone looking at this movie in about two years from now will be left bewildered with the thought ‘that was an actual thing?’. It comes across as so smug and self-congratulatory on behalf of the producers that it sucks the entertainment value right out of it.
There’s also the ‘technical’ side of the story, if you look at it, the stakes of the movie get upped halfway through, as Alex decides to have his phone deleted, but if you think about it, that’s not how any teenager would go about solving the problem. Most teenagers would click on the youtube app, search for a solution online or just reboot the phone once or twice, not the final, end all solution the movie shoehorns in. You’d only start to think about it, if you were too bored to care about the characters, which could happen as they come across as 2D as the city they inhabit, a gaping flaw in the writing.
Voice wise all the people are there to make the movie shine, the music is a bit cookie cutter, but then again, you have to keep it light and upbeat and what better way than to take recent pop songs.
The Blu-ray comes with loads of extras, including a short story that situates itself in the Hotel Transylvania universe, and of course many features about the movie itself, thus commentaries, music clips, snippets about the characters and the cast and so on. There is a lot of extra content to explore for those who actually liked the movie, which are probably the younger viewers. The special features are all laid out in such a format that they are more direct towards children.
Conclusion
The Emoji movie has a rather niche audience, not because not many people should like this movie, but because the writers and producers wrote the movie right into a corner and left it with an identity crisis the size of the staff who worked on it combined. If you are easily distracted and have a rather critical mind when it comes to happy endings then give this movie a wide berth, if however you want something to keep your mind empty and your eyes glazed over with a story that’s about as forgettable as the memes in it then this movie will be just your thing.
The Emoji Movie (Blu-ray) - Movie Review,
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