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The Emoji Movie Movie Review

The Emoji Movie is a 2017 animated comedy film from Sony Animation. It’s a mediocre, but not horrible movie.

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“Nobody leaves the phone!

Delete them!“

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Hidden inside a smartphone, the bustling city of Textopolis is home to all emojis. Each emoji has only one facial expression, except for Gene, an exuberant emoji with multiple expressions. Determined to become “normal” like the other emojis, Gene enlists the help of his best friend Hi-5 and a notorious code breaker called Jailbreak. During their travels through the other apps, the three emojis discover a great danger that could threaten their phone’s very existence.

So basically this movie is one giant rip-off of much better movies from before. The most obvious targets were ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ and especially ‘Inside Out’. Both of those are classics from their respective studios, and this one is just an infinitely inferior copy.

It has conflicting messages about consumerism and it rarely really knows what it wants to say. The movie is fun for sure as it’s fast paced, solidly executed in its action and the world building to me was pretty good actually. But no matter how involving it is, the film lacked soul and was very artificial in that area.

Also, the characters are quite unlikable for the most time. They’re actually not badly developed, at least the main ones, but still the likability factor was off for them. Gene is a meh emoji who can show more emotions, and thus his journey is very standard for animated fare.

Hi-5 is a bland sidekick of his whereas Jailbreak is also a typical princess who doesn’t want to be a princess. The protagonists’ parents are very repetitive in their humor whereas the character of Poop was horrible. Smiler is a great villain, though. Overall, the interactions here are fine, but the characters are far from great.

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The Emoji Movie is actually very well animated. I liked this world, I liked the look of the emojis and I particularly liked the colorful, polished display of its visuals. The score is also fine, but the direction, dialogue and especially its juvenile humor are very lacking. It’s overall a mediocre film, but nowhere near as terrible as many have said.

The Emoji Movie is nowhere near as terrible as the majority of the critics said it is. It looks good, the world building is great and it is overall fun and engaging to watch, but it definitely is very mediocre in the areas of humor which is juvenile, scripting which is copying much better films such as ‘Ralph’ and ‘Inside Out’ and characters who are mostly unlikable stereotypes.