The Emoji Movie

The Emoji Movie

🖕👉💩 - Nostalgia Critic

Genre:	Comedy Sci-fi Animated Adventure
Directed By:	Tony Leondis
Produced By:	Michelle Raimo Kouyate
Written By:	Tony Leondis Eric Siegel
Starring:	T. J. Miller James Corden Anna Faris Maya Rudolph Steven Wright Jennifer Coolidge Christina Aguilera Sofía Vergara Sean Hayes Patrick Stewart
Photography:	Color
Distributed By:	Columbia Pictures Sony Pictures Releasing
Release Date:	July 23, 2017 (Regency Village Theatre) July 28, 2017 (United States)
Runtime:	86 minutes
Country:	United States
Language:	English
Budget:	$50 million
Box Office:	$217.8 million

The Emoji Movie, originally titled Emojimovie: Express Yourself, is a 3D computer-animated science-fiction comedy film that is directed by Tony Leondis, and written by Leondis, Eric Siegel, and Mike White based on the emoji faces, smileys, and graphics used in electronic messages. It includes the voices of T.J. Miller, James Corden, Anna Faris, Maya Rudolph, Steven Wright, Jennifer Coolidge, Christina Aguilera, Sofía Vergara, Sean Hayes, and Patrick Stewart. It was produced by Sony Pictures Animation, and was released on July 28, 2017, by Columbia Pictures.

Plot

The plot focuses on Gene, an exuberant meh emoji who has more than one facial expression, which is insanely rare in the emoji world. Gene is supposed to be a "meh" emoji, but is unsure of what to do with his various other expressions. Gene then enlists the help of his best buddy Hi-5, and the former princess turned code breaker emoji, Jailbreak. They travel through various apps on the phone they inhabit, such as Candy Crush and Just Dance. But when danger hits the phone caused by the villainous emoji Smiler (a smiling face emoji, if that isn’t obvious enough), it is up to the unlikely trio to save their world before it is permanently erased.

Why It Sucks

Warning: Do not insert any pointers among the lines of "it's a rip-off of Wreck-It Ralph, The Lego Movie, Zootopia, Toy Story and/or Inside Out", "Sony cancelled the Popeye movie for this" (neither of which are true in the slightest) and "no one wanted this film" in this section.

The idea of having a movie based on emojis is, while not the worst concept, incredibly bland and confusing.
The movie is overloaded with product placements from real-life phone apps, particularly the inclusions of music service "Spotify" as well as "Facebook", "Candy Crush", "YouTube", "Instagram and "Just Dance Now" in the film. The film also tries to leech off the smartphone popular culture, even though the writers might not have done enough research about smartphone popular culture despite Sony Corporation, the company that owns Sony Pictures Animation and thus the rights to this film, is known for their technology.
- In an interview of the film, director Tony Leondis said that he wanted to incorporate real life apps into the movie. While product placement can be used well in some films, you should consider the fact that not everyone is going to like it, as they might think that they're watching an ad instead of a movie.
Many poorly-written, juvenile, disgusting, and unfunny jokes that often take forever to finish, particularly the scene where Hi-5 throws up a corn candy before putting it back into his mouth and later throwing it up again.
In a severe miscasting, Patrick Stewart voices Poop, the poop emoji. Apparently Stewart himself said that his casting was meant to be a joke.
The story, about a misunderstood character in search for a way to please others at first, but eventually accepts himself/herself for who he/she is, is very predictable and formulaic. It also uses ideas that were used in other movies before, particularly a never explained cliché plot twist consisting of Gene's dad having the same problem as his son (which feels rather rushed as an attempt to make audiences understand why Gene has the problem), alongside the fact that there is an ending where everyone dances (which has been done in several other movies).
- Even Hi-5's motivation for joining Gene is generic, as he just wants to be popular among the other emojis again.
Jailbreak is an obvious clone of Wyldstyle from The Lego Movie^GMW, in terms of personality and character design. She is also a ripoff of Olivia "Sombra" Colomar from Overwatch^AGW since both characters are notorious hackers.
Smiler is a very basic and plain villain, and her design has an uncanny valley feel to it since she always smiles no matter what. However, despite this, she ends up being the best part of this movie.
Scummy innuendos/placing, particularly the scene with the elephant and dashing away emojis (which is supposed to represent that the elephant is farting).
The film has flat characterization (e.g. emojis are only allowed to feel the emotions they are). Almost every emoji character has this flaw, especially Gene's parents, who mistreat him for his problem.
- The characterization is also inconsistent, as every single emoji seems to express other emotions than the one that they have to do when they are used on the phone, and as a result, it undermines the entire plot.
  - Even Smiler is inconsistently portrayed, as she gives a "be yourself" advice to the other emojis, even though she sees Gene as a malfunction because of being multi-expressional emoji (however, she did have a good reason for this).
- Gene^LCW, the film's main protagonist, is an incredibly generic and basic protagonist who wants to fit in but has something that gets in his way.
- Jailbreak^LCW is a very underdeveloped love interest and a dull protagonist with no personality who is nothing more than a so-called "strong, independent female character", who mostly exists just to promote girl power. Her relationship with Gene in this film is also forced and bland.
  - Her claim of female emojis being only princesses and brides falls flat on its face when you remember there are several emojis in the film who are female, including Gene's mother and Smiler, and yet almost none of them are princesses or brides. In fact, Smiler was even the original emoji and founder!
- Gene's parents, Mel and Mary Meh, only exist to give off one joke: when they're impressed, they look and sound bored.
Some moments in the film are rather inappropriate for a children's film, particularly when Poop nearly utters the word "sh*t."
False advertising: Despite the heavy marketing of Poop on posters and in the trailers, this character, voiced by Patrick Stewart, only gets a few lines and doesn't even have an important role in the movie whatsoever.
- Speaking of the marketing, there was a promotional image for the film on Twitter which spoofed Hulu's series The Handmaid's Tale. In the image, Smiler was depicted as being the series' main character Offred. Because of the themes of the aforementioned series, and the seemingly blatant misunderstanding of them, the image sparked controversy of the film's marketing, resulting in the tweet to be deleted. Even though the tweet was deleted, the damage was already done due to bad marketing.
The movie completely forgets about Hi-5's subplot of becoming a favorite and focuses only on Gene.
The humans' story is barely even touched upon throughout the whole movie, essentially wasting a sub-plot that only comes across as a redundant afterthought.
The voice acting is shockingly mediocre, where everyone constantly underacts and sound like they just want to get out of the project, with the exception of Maya Rudolph who actually goes about overacting.
Like Fred: The Movie, the film gives no indication that the characters are fantasizing, such as in the Candy Crush scene where Jailbreak is thinking about what will happen if she lines Gene up with 2 other yellow candies.
The movie portrays the teens as phone addicts that can't communicate with each other except by text messages, but instead of criticizing this problem, it encourages it.
The film will often spout random, dated slang (even by 2017 standards) such as Gene and Hi-5 saying "#truth" and "#blessed".
The writers did a not-so-good job of representing the characters in the movie. Smiler is depicted as the villain even though all she wanted to do was to protect Textopolis from being deleted while Gene, despite being the protagonist, was the one really responsible for most of the problems that occurred, as he almost caused the entire phone to almost have its data deleted. Basically, the movie tries to force viewers to sympathize with the protagonist and to root against the villain without giving the usual proper characterization to them as a reason to do this.
- Not helping is that neither Gene nor Jailbreak show any mercy for the Just Dance girl and anyone else who were deleted from existence.
- On the topic of sympathizing with the protagonists, it was already hard to sympathize with Hi-5, as he was already self-centered and arrogant by the time he is introduced in the film.
The dialogue can be excruciating at times.
The film clearly knows nothing about phones (and ironically, this comes from a studio whose parent company is better known for their technology). Particularly, in the climax, when the phone is in the process of having its data get wiped, a lot of apps get deleted in the process, but when Alex unplugs the phone, all the apps get restored. When you delete an app, it's gone and there's no way of getting it back (or until you re-install it, that is).
For some reason, you can get to the phone from Dropbox via Twitter.
The pacing is super sluggish, particularly as a result of several scenes occurring in Candy Crush, Spotify, Instagram, and YouTube scenes being nothing more than ways to increase the runtime.
Similar to Foodfight!, the movie makes an unnecessary reference to Casablanca^GMW, which is impossible for kids to get.
The movie starts with Gene saying "Emojis are the most important thing in communication history" which is an extremely false moral (the most important thing in communication is...well, words, and words were used to write this script even though at one point, Alex's friend says "words aren't cool").

Redeeming Qualities

Like other Sony Pictures Animation films, the animation is solid and sometimes creative.
- To add to this, despite the overuse of blatant and obvious product placement, the way the animators were able to create the world of the phone and the different apps were well done.
Decent character designs for most of the characters, as they are similar to the emojis they're based on.
Excellent soundtrack for the film composed by Patrick Doyle (who also did the soundtrack for Brave^GMW and Artemis Fowl), as well as the song "Good Vibrations".
Every once in a while, the film will have an okay line.
Decent cinematography.
A few good jokes that actually worked:
1. The old-school emoticons such as ":)" are elders.
2. The scene where the Just Dance girl is dancing in the garbage, wondering why she keeps dancing while crying.
3. There is an amusing moment with the Columbia Pictures logo with an emoji.
In relation to WIS#7, Smiler is the best part of the entire movie. Even if you hated her for being the villain, her intentions and motivations are understandable and were defined better than the ones from the protagonists, making her a very well defined character overall and a sympathetic villain in particular. Everything she did was to stop Gene from destroying the Emojis world; she wanted to delete him in order to protect the phone and its data from getting deleted.
Despite the voice acting being below average, T.J. Miller's performance is decent.

Reception

Once the teaser trailer dropped, The Emoji Movie was immediately met with universal hatred by critics and audiences alike, with major criticism being lamented at the script's bad jokes, blatant product placement, voice performances, lack of originality, and plot. Many also called it "unfunny and a waste of time," and calling it one of the worst animated movies and the worst movie of 2017 and compared it unfavorably to The Lego Movie^GMW, Zootopia^GMW Inside Out^GMW, Toy Story^GMW and Wreck-It Ralph^GMW.

At one point the film was the lowest-rated animated film on Rotten Tomatoes with a 0% rating (it has since been changed to a 7% rating) and the site's critical consensus displays a no symbol emoji ("🚫"). It has a 3.2/10 on IMDb and a 12/100 on Metacritic, indicating "overwhelming dislike".

Box office

The Emoji Movie opened at #2 on its opening weekend grossing $24,531,923 domestically. The film would later make a total domestic gross of $86,089,513. In foreign countries, the film made $131,687,133. Overall, the film grossed $217,776,646 worldwide against its $50 million budget. Making it a box office hit, despite being panned by critics and viewers.

Awards and nominations

The movie won four Razzie Awards: Worst Director (Tony Leondis), Worst Screen Combo (any two obnoxious emojis), Worst Screenplay and Worst Picture at the 38th Golden Raspberry Awards ceremony. Making it the 1st animated film to take home Worst Picture in Razzie history and with the most Razzies. But despite this it was nominated at Kids' Choice Award 2018 for Favorite Animated Movie but lost to Pixar's Coco^GMW.

Trivia

Jordan Peele was asked to voice the Poop emoji. He refused, and he's cited this offer as the reason he decided to start a directorial career.
Ilana Glazer was originally cast for the role of Jailbreak, but for unknown reasons, she was replaced by Anna Faris, who previously voiced Sam Sparks in the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs films, who interestingly is also the love interest of the protagonist.