Review of The Emoji Movie (2017) by Joanillo — 27 Feb 2018

"The Emoji Movie" is maybe one of the most perplexing pieces of media I have ever borne witness to. I feel strange saying this, but this movie was written... incorrectly. I have never before felt this way about a film, but this movie was written wrong. The worst part isn't even the fact that the main characters are representations of things as characterless as a coat rack, it's the fact that the film doesn't know what it wants to be. This movie has a bizarre tendency of making overly cynical jokes, yet presenting them in such a way that children are guaranteed to take the wrong message. For example, the phrase "Words are lame, use an emoji" are presented at a certain point to the user of the phone where the eponymous emojis reside, yet this phrase is not balanced in any way by a differing perspective, a sarcastic glance, or any similar method of showing that it was a joke. This happens multiple times throughout the film. It is also worth noting that pretty much every line spoken by the "Jailbreak" character seems to be there just so they can consolidate the female gender into a marketing tactic like they did with "Ghostbusters". Thankfully, it doesn't work at all, and just makes a few scenes a lot more awkward than they would have been normally. I recall actually pausing the movie when she said the line "You know men are always taking credit for things that women come up with" after the main character figured out what her reasoning was and confirmed that he knew what she was talking about, not at all taking any credit for what she was saying.

In terms of the rest of the movie, I feel bad for anyone who paid to sit through 2 hours of advertisements for dropbox. I almost didn't expect it to be as bad as it is. For a film which prominently shows spam emails as a recurring joke, it sure does present a lot of its own spam. Another pause moment happened when the main characters escaped from a villain by going into dropbox, to which the girl replied "It's illegal malware, and this app is secure!". I believe I could feel my brain slowly melting out of my ears when that statement was made.

While I didn't enjoy this movie, it is kind of a shame that it had to be this way. A lot of people probably didn't like this movie solely because it was essentially a drawn-out advertisement for smartphone downloads. The problem is, there is another movie that is essentially one big advertisement for products, yet it's one of the best animated films I've ever seen! If the people making "The Emoji Movie" had taken any inspiration from "The Lego Movie", we could have had a potentially amazing film! It is especially depressing since the animation in this film is as good as it could be, being wonderfully stylized and moving beautifully. All in all, "The Emoji Movie" is maybe one of the most depressing pieces of cinema I've ever seen. In terms of recommendations, if you are a person who likes to tear films apart, I would recommend watching this film once and never again. To everyone else, avoid this film like the black plague. It's bad for you and terrible for your kids.