REVIEW: "The Emoji Movie" Trailer

The first full length trailer for The Emoji Movie has been released. The plot appears to be inspired by Wreck It Ralph and Inside Out, with the main characters living inside a teenage boy’s smartphone. Gene, the “Meh” (😒) emoji, struggles to fit in because he experiences a wider range of emotion than just “meh”. After being sent to the “Loser Lounge” for making the wrong face when he was used to send a text, Gene is joined by two other emoji to take a nonsensical quest through other apps and The Cloud to save the day before the phone is reformatted.

Bizarrely, even though the main conflict in the film seems to be that Gene is a multi-expressional emoji, he is far from the only one. Every other emoji seen displays a wide range of feelings including fear, happiness, anger, etc. And how are non-facial emoji’s like a flower or a star supposed to behave? Hi-5, a hand emoji, is one of the three main characters and he displays a wide range of expressions. Is the hand emoji supposed to represent a certain emotion, or is he allowed to have free emotional range just because his body isn’t shaped like a face? Oh! What if Textopolis is a dystopian world in which facial emojis are a lower class in their society and are only allowed one emotion assigned to them at birth. The Loser Lounge is a prison where rebels who display more than one emotion are sent. And Gene is our plucky hero destined to save the world. Or not. It doesn’t appear this much thought was put into the plot, even though it’s the driving conflict of the film. The film is set to be released in theaters on July 28, 2017. Maybe skip this one.