By Julia Comerford
The 2017 3D-animated movie, The Emoji Movie, is true to its title. It is simply a movie about emojis. But why even make a movie about emojis? What could be so interesting about emojis that an entire movie can be made about it? The director and writer of the film, Tony Leondis, attempted to answer these questions and failed. He failed because he centered the film around the “meh” emoji, which expresses feelings of average mediocrity. This choice is one of his mistakes which contributed to the creation of one of the worst-ranked animated films of 2017, receiving 15th place on IMDB’s worst-ranked animated films of 2017 list and a nine percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Despite the terrible reviews and uninteresting plot line, The Emoji Movie succeeds in opening the viewers’ eyes to how our society is so reliant on technology that we have not noticed the degree to which this reliance has grown.
What could be so bad about a movie centered on emojis? There was a lot of hope for this movie, as emojis are a form of communication of the future. The introduction of the “meh” emoji as the protagonist in the beginning of the film immediately throws the viewer on a negative path. The “meh” emoji, named Gene, has a defect where he is able to make more faces than “meh”. He travels through the apps and inner world of the smart phone screen to find a way to become a normal emoji with a singular “meh” face.
The film brings the viewer into a physical place simulating the inner smart phone screen, we are able to directly see how people today rely so much on our phones, especially for communication, and how overwhelming technology can be. The cinematography makes the viewer feel like they are inside their own cellphone with the overpowering amount of different flashing colors, lights and sounds that distract us from real life. Being inside of the virtual cellphone inspires the viewer to come outside of their cellphone and realize how involved we are in our phones.
When the characters enter the Facebook app, they hear people frantically saying “Look at my baby!”, “This is what I ate for lunch!”, “This is what I ate for dinner!”, which immediately causes Gene to comment, “Wow, everybody is talking about themselves. How does he know so many people?”. His comrade, the “high five” emoji, replies, “None of these people know him but they ‘like him’, and that’s what matters in this life”. The Emoji Movie uses a widely used form of communication, emojis, to make a direct reference to how people get carried away from their own lives into the world of technology and social media. It uses technology to show people how much we are using technology. Although the plot line of The Emoji Movie was “meh”, the message behind the plot was not so “meh”after all.
