Perhaps one can understand why Martin Scorsese and Pedro Almodovar weep for the state of contemporary cinema: we’re getting a movie starring emojis. We won’t go so far as to say film is dead, but certainly, commerce and brand leverage are really taking the fore at the studio level.
Anyway, this animated effort brings those icons on your phone to life with T.J Miller, Ilana Glazer and James Corden leading the voice cast, that follows an emoji who is burdened with the flaw of being able to express more than one emotion. He will probably learn a very valuable lesson about life by time the movie is done. Here’s the synopsis:
THE EMOJI MOVIE unlocks the never-before-seen secret world inside your smartphone. Hidden within the messaging app is Textopolis, a bustling city where all your favorite emojis live, hoping to be selected by the phone’s user. In this world, each emoji has only one facial expression – except for Gene (T.J. Miller), an exuberant emoji who was born without a filter and is bursting with multiple expressions. Determined to become “normal” like the other emojis, Gene enlists the help of his handy best friend Hi-5 (James Corden) and the notorious code breaker emoji Jailbreak (Ilana Glazer). Together, they embark on an epic “app-venture” through the apps on the phone, each its own wild and fun world, to find the Code that will fix Gene. But when a greater danger threatens the phone, the fate of all emojis depends on these three unlikely friends who must save their world before it’s deleted forever.
“The Emoji Movie” opens on August 11, 2017.