Background
When Pixar’s Up was teased, the viewers were introduced to a beautiful sky, followed by an incredible batch of colorful balloons. After the balloons had risen, an old house floated up into frame, where the protagonist, Mr. Fredrickson, greeted the audience with a word; “’Afternoon.” The scene was flamboyant in color, imagination, and sights that would leave the viewers wanting to know more about the world of Up. The idea was written in 2004, and was released 5 years later in 2009.
On July 28th, 2017, the world was introduced to The Emoji Movie. When the teaser trailer was uploaded to YouTube on December 20th, 2016, many thought it was a joke. Even Sony Animation’s “tease” was using a “meh-emoji” to debut the enthusiasm behind the production. In addition to a poor announcement, the viewers were also shown a poop joke, using a poop emoji. Quickly, critics worldwide popped popcorn, scheduled the day to see the movie, and had their 0% reviews ready for Rotten Tomatoes.
Many including myself ask, “How did this unoriginal and quickly dated concept get such a horrible inspiration?” According to an interview with the creator of The Emoji Movie, Tony Leondis answers, “So basically, when I was thinking of the new project, I was thinking, ‘God, I love Toy Story. What is the new toy?’ That’s really what I was thinking, ‘What is the new toy out there that hasn’t been explored?’ And I looked down on my phone and someone had sent me an emoji, and I was like, ‘Emojis are the new toys, they’re the toys of the 21st Century” (Paragraph 4). Clearly, Tony didn’t know what the definition of a ‘toy’ was.
Upon the magical day of release, The Emoji Movie earned an unarguably overrated small batch of reviews that claimed the movie was a solid 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. By that night, the score has increased to a 3%, and a week later it had climbed to a massive 8%, ranking the movie as one of the worst of all time.
Review & Recommendation
“Once the adverts that play before any movie seemingly came to a close, to my utter dismay, another eighty minutes of advertisement started to play. And once these adverts were over, I walked out of the theater because the credits are rolling,” states Alex of I Hate Everything (5:37-5:50). This statement in and of itself describes charismatically the exact description of The “Emoji” Movie.
When I walked into the theatre to watch The Emoji Movie, I expected the worst. While watching the movie, I tried to look for the good. When I walked out of the theatre, I saw no good, nor did I feel good. I did expect the movie to be bad, but I did not expect the movie to be a product placement. Throughout the whole movie, products are shoved down audiences’ throats such as Dropbox, Candy Crush, Twitter, YouTube, and—dare I say it—Just Dance. Though the movie would not be any better, if the products were just pushed to the background as subliminal advertising, the whole product placement would not be agitating. However, the directors of the movie thought it would be a brilliant idea to make the ads blatant. For example, Dropbox serves as a pivotal plot point, as one of the characters, Jailbreak, tells viewers indirectly that Dropbox keeps all files safe from malware and viruses. The end of the movie is your average cliché dance party, brought to you in part by Just Dance for free only on iOS and Android. At this point the writers are just shooting everyone watching the movie a middle finger.
The broken subplot of the movie is about a boy named Alex who wants the attention of his crush, Addie. He sends her a ‘meh’ emoji to suede her with the digital lingo, but the emoji just so happens to be Gene, the multi-expressive, actual main character of the movie. Gene makes an odd frightened face when selected by his user, Alex, thus sending the wrong expression to Addie. Gene and co. continue to unintentionally harass Alex’s social life throughout this movie in this same way. Because of the poorly written dialogue and the cliché “romance,” the movie does a horrible job conveying if the subplot is trying to add a serious story or make fun of modern-day socializing on phones.
Noticeably, two things are wrong with the overall plot, one part being the concept/inspiration. Like Tony stated before, the movie was inspired by Toy Story (and maybe a hint of Inside Out with the ‘behind the scenes’ idea). Obvious to almost everyone except Tony, emojis are not toys. If anything, they are a silly way of describing one’s thoughts, an excuse for not having an expansive vocabulary to explain one’s emotions on a topic, and are used as marketing strategies to be hip and cool with this generation of kids. Most teens don’t imagine magical things happening to their environment, young children do. This is where The Emoji Movie gets the wrong idea.
The Emoji Move also runs into issues with other movies by copying their moral guidelines and themes without really having one. One movie that it rips off is Wreck it Ralph and the Lego movie, where the main character wants to be different from everyone else around him. He soon meets another misfit who also aims to accomplish a similar goal, which brings their bond of friendship together. The Emoji Movie copies this exact same concept, but it twists the ending to the point where the moral of the story is basically nonexistent. If that is unclear, then you’ll have to watch the movie for yourself. With that said, even a decent movie has a moral/theme that can be clearly defined. Using Wreck-It Ralph again for example, the up front moral is to ‘be yourself and don’t let anyone else tell you who you are.’ The Emoji Movie does not have a clear theme, and the writers probably didn’t have one in mind to begin with because they were too focused on getting that sweet dough from product placements.
So what does this mean for the film industry? Well, the only people that kind of liked the movie were children who couldn’t understand anything going on except ‘ooooh, pretty colors!’ and parents who could take their minds of their kids for an hour and twenty minutes. Sony must have thought that emojis were so trendy that they would never get old, and that anyone that hated them would watch the movie to see how bad it was. It is unfortunate that the movie was so bad and lackluster in every aspect, that even moviegoers that figured, “Hey, The Emoji Movie would be so bad it’s good,” hated it. The target audience is the same for almost every animated movie out now, including Despicable Me 3, Rock Dog (you don’t want to know), and Sing! to name a few. If this pattern continues, the only decent animated movies will be owned by either Disney or Dreamworks. This pattern may even leak into other genres—oh wait—they already have. Oh well, that’s another discussion for another day.
So would I recommend this movie to anyone? Why should I decide if anyone should see this film? I’ll let the “positive” reviews from Rotten Tomatoes speak for themselves:
“One of the best movies of all time with a great plot, amazing characters, a scary villain, and one heck of of an ending. It’s honestly better than the Godfather Part 1 and 2.” states a viewer.
Another proclaims, “It’s as if god himself came down to Sony Animations to create the most accurate depiction of heaven for our unworthy eyes to view upon. Every god fearing man, woman and child must watch this magnificent piece of art, but lo, I warn thee: you will come out a new being on an entirely new field of existence.”
One reviewer tells readers, “I went to see this movie on opening day and man, did it not disappoint. The amount of work put into this flawless movie is absolutely amazing and I couldn’t be prouder for using emoji’s. 10/10 would emoji again.”
For the most solid review to show the amount of sheer ‘power’ this movie displays to the viewers, a reviewer puts everything everyone needs to know about the one movie in one sentence: “Worst high school musical (in my opinion).”
In short, this movie kicked the can.
Bibliography/Recourses:
Freeman, Molly. “How Toy Story Inspired The Emoji Movie.” Screen Rant, Screen Rant, 10 July 2017, screenrant.com/emoji-movie-director-tony-leondis-interview/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2017.
IHEOfficial. “YouTube.” YouTube, I HATE EVERYTHING, 9 Aug. 2017, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjObqNxcyig. Accessed 17 Aug. 2017.
Tomatoes, Rotten. “Audience Reviews.” The Emoji Movie – Movie Reviews – Rotten Tomatoes, Rotten Tomatoes, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_emoji_movie/reviews/?type=user. Accessed 20 Aug. 2017.
Canthology 