‘The Emoji Movie’ review: Meh over matter

Unlike Gene (TJ Miller), the meh emoji who can’t help but turn into all sorts of emotions, Tony Leondis’ The Emoji Movie is a cartoon that aims to provoke all sorts of emotions but can’t help just being meh.

It’s all in the phone

The cartoon’s essentially just about a boy who can’t express his feelings to a girl he likes.

The main conceit of the cartoon however is that most of the action does not happen in the world of the boy but in his smartphone where a city populated by emojis exists. It is Gene’s first day at work but when it is his time to shine and be the meh that he was raised to be, he gets nervous and turns into a weird emoji that is sent to the girl. He is declared a malfunction and is ordered by Smiler (Maya Rudolph) to be deleted before the boy, embarrassed by his gadget’s weirdness, resets the entire phone.

What could have been a premise that is ripe for all sorts of discourse about this world’s addiction with shallow communication is oversimplified by The Emoji Movie into an immature cash grab. Entire portions of it are dedicated to serve as probably paid advertisements for apps that, while ingeniously incorporated into the narrative by screenwriters Leondis, Eric Siegel, and Matt White, result in excruciatingly tedious adventures that aim only to be diversions from the fact that everything else in the film is rather empty.

Aiming for relevance

There are some instances where the cartoon reaches for some sort of relevance.

Gene’s mission to be reprogrammed by Jailbreak (Anna Faris), a mysterious hacking emoji, to fit in and be the meh he believes he is destined to be fits very well in this culture where the virtues of diversity are being countered by intolerance. However, the cartoon itself doesn’t evolve to take its potential moral seriously enough for it to amount to anything sincere. If anything, its moral feels like an afterthought, a tacked-on message to children who might be struggling to make anything out of the cartoon’s proliferation of unadulterated nonsense.

The Emoji Movie, if anything, advocates shallowness. It pursues a world where the expression of complex emotions is forfeited for convenience. It champions mediocrity, and by eliminating the process of individuality through writing because of the expediency of picture-messages, it actually despises diversity. 

Puns, jokes, and simplistic lessons

The cartoon’s a parade of grating puns, characters who are nothing but walking jokes, and simplistic lessons that are all swimming underneath its celebration of everything that is wrong about this world, where writing and reading are being briskly overtaken by symbols that are forcing the world to stop thinking. – Rappler.com

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ ‘Tirad Pass.’ Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.