The Emoji Movie

The Emoji Movie videos

Cast & Crew

T.J. Miller

Gene Voice

James Corden

Hi-5 Voice

Anna Faris

Jailbreak Voice

Maya Rudolph

Smiler Voice

Steven Wright

Mel Meh Voice

Jennifer Coolidge

Mary Meh Voice

Patrick Stewart

Poop Voice

Christina Aguilera

Akiko Glitter Voice

Sofía Vergara

Flamenca Voice

Rachael Ray

Spam Voice

Sean Hayes

"Devil" Steven Voice

Jake T. Austin

Alex Voice

Tati Gabrielle

Addie Voice

Jude Kouyate

Poop Jr. "PJ" Voice

Jeff Ross

Internet Troll Voice

Hunter March

Hysterical Laughter Voice

Anthony Leondis

Laughter, Broom, Pizza Voice

Melissa Sturm

Angel, Phone Store Employee Voice

Eric Siegel

Reggie Ram Tech Voice

Sean Giambrone

Travis Voice

Anthony Leondis

Director

Anthony Leondis

Screenwriter

Eric Siegel

Screenwriter

Mike White

Screenwriter

Michelle Raimo

Producer

Ben Waisbren

Executive Producer

William J. Caparella

Film Editing

Patrick Doyle

Original Music

Carlos Zaragoza

Production Design

Ryan Carlson

Art Director

Dean Gordon

Art Director

Mary Hidalgo

Casting

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Critic Reviews for The Emoji Movie

Audience Reviews for The Emoji Movie

• Jul 12, 2018

  Look, I'm not saying the movie was bad because it's a movie based around Emojis, that's one of it's major problems, but at the same time one of the least you should be worrying about. Yeah, it'll make sense. I can give movies with unusual ideas a go, and that's if I'm even interested in watching it. If they could manage to turn something as plotless as Legos into one of the best animated films of its year, as well as whole, then, hey, why not give it a go with other products that have no real story behind them? Well, it seems that they attempted that with The Emoji movie and Patrick Stewart-ed all over it. First and foremost is the entire idea of it trying to appear hip, trendy, and every typical crap you'd expect a movie desperate to appeal to smart phone users. Now we move onto story and plot...yeah, I can't keep a straight face with that one. THIS is the movie's BIGGEST problem. The story and plot behind this are cringe and painfully unoriginal. The movie doesn't even try to use its "be who you truly are" narrative and try something more...fresh with it. Hell even garbage like Cars managed to try something "fresh" with it's fish out of water and Doc Hollywood rip off storyline (and I'm only saying Cars is better than the Emoji movie when compared, because a good movie it's not anyway). No, you get exactly what you'd expect with a movie using that storyline. The lead character is different, causing it to backfire, they are trying to force him to be like everyone else (eg. a "normal", one-reaction type of Emoji), and results in the corporation trying to annihilate him. That's as easy as I can make it for you, and you can pretty much guess how it goes from there. The different guy meets another person who's also unusually different, they try to fix his problem, and it turns out at the end he really shouldn't have to conform to what society thinks. Why be the same schtick when you can stand out? There was so much potential for this movie to also explore commentary on social media and the users, but they drop it immediately because the movie would rather focus on product placement than anything else (yeah, trust me when I say they literally make a huge emphasis on selling Candy Crush, Facebook, and Youtube Cat videos than selling a good story). One conversation is how the phone user has so many friends and why he's so popular, and the High-Five emoji states how they're not real friends, but people who just like him. We don't get past that, because they'd rather go on to yap about Spotify and other unoriginal crap. The people behind this couldn't even be bothered to take advantage of the social media apps to explore the kid and give us some more depth into him. Then, we have my PERSONAL favorite complaint, and it's the lack of LOGIC behind it. I don't care that the emojis live in a world of their own, that they communicate, etc. To Hell with that. What bothers me is how it doesn't even seem to realize how absurd its setup of the Emoji world is. Apparently, Textopolis isn't a city that every phone out there is universally connected to. No, EACH PHONE has their own Textopolis. This brings up many questions and concerns. The Emojis don't want to be deleted because of the mayhem Gene's stupidity has caused on the phone (another point I'll bring up momentarily), but yet if thought about logically, what happens when people upgrade to new phones? People get new phones every year and data is lost, therefore the entire idea of an individual, conscious Textopolis in every phone makes no sense, because the horrifying fact is that those emojis are going to be wiped out once people get a new phones. It would just have been a REALISTIC approach if Textopolis had been a world of its own within a branch of the Internet, not just one different city in each phone. The other logical fault to this is how only the "main" human seems to be suffering from phone troubles thanks to Gene. You can't expect me or anyone else to believe that this hasn't happened before in SEVERAL OTHER phones. Which actually leads me to the kid's phone glitching. Why does the phone and the apps start acting up, get played, and activate when the Emojis travel to and mess around in them? I'm positive the kid's phone (I keep calling him kid because I didn't even bother remembering his name, since the humans only exist just to exist) should not be the only one glitching, making sounds, playing music randomly, and games opening up because I'm positive every other phone has had Emojis traveling around and using apps. Finally, why does Textopolis have an entire company dedicated to where Emojis go to get used? This alone makes no sense whatsoever. Opening up text apps and emoji text boards in your phone happens in mere seconds, and somehow they can predict when people are about to open up their messages and the Emoji characters (the most popular ones used) literally line up in chambers to be selected. What happens when none of the emojis people want are in Most Popular? Do they haul ass to find the Dragon Emoji since it's not in the lineup? Do they teleport the Salsa Dancer or Pregnant woman Emoji when they can somehow predict the users are going to pick those? None of this makes logical sense. It would make more sense sense if, like a State Farm worker, the emojis just vanish for a second or so (all of the emojis; a new one at a time for turns, since evidently Textopolis can't have such a small amount of Emojis with only one of each, and a handful of different skin colors), and then reappear back on spot once it went through. The characters in the movie are also not original, so I won't even bother. Another fine example of what NOT to do in a movie is making dry, boring jokes. The movie tries to throw you clever jokes or even forced ones, and none are funny. The CLOSEST this movie got to getting a giggle out of me was when Smiler (Maya Rudolph) comes into the office, and tells another Emoji "I am so ANGRY right now, ahehehe," all while holding onto her gigantic, toothy smile. She was technically my "favorite" character, because I tend to love bright, cheerful, somewhat diabolical, and extra smiley characters, but she still didn't manage to win me over. Her attitude in the movie essentially ruined any chances of my adding her as a real favorite. However, I will defend it in one way: it is NOT worse than Food Fight. No sir. In Emoji's defense, and take into mind that the following is just "for what's worth", it's actually beautifully animated and has a "better" story (whereas Food Fight couldn't even be bothered to find out what its own plot really is). I'l stop there because there's just too much to complain about. But on a final note, that's not how wiping your phone's data completely works either.

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  Super Reviewer
• Mar 26, 2018

  Did you love Inside Out? I know I did. I never felt like it was Pixar's best movie (there was too much repetition with the other emotions causing havoc in their host's mind), but I loved that, you could say, that it was a movie that dealt with mental illnesses in a mature and intelligent way. It also explored issues about how, in the long run, you cannot avoid being sad. Sadness is an emotion that will never be able to be avoided for as long as you're alive, but the movie never shied away from the fact that, you know what, this is a part of life and if you wanna be sad for one reason or another, then it's OK. I obviously simplified it down, but Inside Out explores these issues intelligently with heart, soul and humor. You may be asking yourself why I've brought this up in reference to The Emoji Movie. Well, unless you're living under a rock and are unable to read this review, you know what emojis are. Those little icons meant to display a singular emotion, whether that be sadness, happiness, anger. There's obviously a shit-ton of emojis out there, but I'm just narrowing it down for the purpose of this review. Well, this movie uses the emojis like Inside Out uses actual emotions. Because, apparently, emojis in this world are as important and relevant as actual conversation and communication. Conceptually, the movie is idiotic right from the start. The meh emoji (I can't believe I just typed that) fails at his one job of being meh. He fails at this by being too many emojis at once, he is called a malfunction and destroys his workplace with his malfunctions. He teams up with the high-five emoji and Jailbreak (the original princess emoji) to reprogram the code so he'll be a proper meh emoji and Alex, the kid who owns the phone the emojis live, won't erase every app later that afternoon. Apparently, one glitch is enough to make this kid want to erase every app on his phone, which he could actually do himself, but he decides to go to this store to have the apps erased. Because the suffering needs to go on even longer. But, fine, that's the basic outline of the story. That's not the problem, naturally, the problem is the horrifyingly lazy humor on display here. Sir Patrick Stewart (yes, he's in this) plays the turd emoji. You can only imagine what his jokes will be like. Puns surrounding the word duty, his being #2, wanting to be soft, but not too soft, people making a stink out of things. Goddamnit, FUCKING WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?!?!?!?! You pay Patrick Stewart to give him trash material to deliver. I like Stewart, he still took the paycheck, but I like him and I think he deserves so much better than this. But that's not the only egregious example of lazy, uninspired humor. There's the emoji monkeys who are on, I quote, monkey business. HA!!! GET IT, BECAUSE THEY'RE MONKEY BUSINESSMEN!!! HUMOR!!!!! To borrow a line from the Honest Trailer from this movie, they run the meh emoji joke into the ground. Mel tells his wife not to overreact and when she goes 'Oh my' in the most bored way possible, he replies 'see, I knew you'd overreact'. MORE HUMOR!!! And they really do run this joke into the ground. If it wasn't funny the first time, it's not gonna be funny the fifth time. It is, quite frankly, the most offensively lazy animated movie in terms of humor that I've seen in ages. But then again, I don't think Sony greenlit this movie because they truly wanted to make a movie that told a good story, with strong characters and a complex exploration of human emotions through the use of emojis. That's not what they wanted to do. They wanted a movie that they could use to sell companies as cross-promotion. Sony has been shy about littering their movies with so much product placement (of their own products) to the point that it's sickening. Everyone remember in Chappie, when they used something like 200 (I'm just guessing, but this is an example) PS4s in order to create one giant supercomputer instead of using, you know, an actual supercomputer. Because in a crime-ridden sci-fi world, it's really easy to find 200 PS4s just laying about. Chappie was distributed by Columbia Pictures, which is owned by Sony. So, obviously, the 200 PS4s were a Sony mandate. This movie, on the other hand, reaches out to other companies in order to get their brand in this movie. One of the few concepts I liked about this movie was the fact that every app is its own unique world. I liked that concept in theory but, of course, given how many brands are in this movie, they just serve like commercials for those specific apps and not because the film requires it. The problem is, though, that this movies take so long to make that a few of the apps they use for their worlds are already outdated by this point. Just Dance and Candy Crush immediately come to mind. My mom loved Candy Crush like two years ago, now she's over it and she's on to the Home/Gardenscapes of the world. And this is a movie made for idiot kids, where if they haven't seen it within the last week, they've already forgotten about it. I can imagine some kid asking his/her parent what the hell Candy Crush is. That's only two of the worlds. Let me just list off the brands that bought some space in this movie. Instagram, Facebook (logo only, since you only see their world from outside), Twitter (the bird logo helps Jailbreak and Hi-5), Spotify, Dropbox, YouTube, WeChat. And that's on top of Candy Crush and Just Dance. Off the top of my head, that's NINE different brands shoved into this movie. I'm sure there's plenty others, but I just forgot about them. Remember how people were up in arms about The Lego Movie being a cynical marketing exercise for the Lego brand instead of the movie. Yes, it was meant to sell the Lego brand, to be sure, but at least they used that brand to tell an insightful story on the importance of creativity for children as they're growing up. It was an actual movie with characters, a story, humor and a lot of heart. It ended up surprising a lot of people with how entertaining it was. Where are those people now??? I mean I guess the fact of the matter is that since this movie wasn't called the Sony Cross-Promotion Marketing Experiment Movie then people couldn't overreact, but goddamn, guys, THIS movie deserves the outrage. I think that's what pisses me off the most. This isn't really a movie as much as it is Sony shoving a lot of brands in there to give them some shameless promotion. And the sad thing is, I'm sure Sony Pictures Animation has a lot of really talented artists that worked hard as fuck for a long time to produce such a cynical piece of trash. And it's not their fault, I'm sure that this was a Sony mandate. And, even if it wasn't, even if it started as a legitimate movie surrounding emojis, Sony got their greedy little hands on it and they absolutely destroyed any chance this film might have had of being good. This movie's existence is unacceptable. I struggle to even think about stuff that I did like. The animation is decent, but really bland. The voice acting is fine, but not particularly inspired. This felt like just a paycheck for everyone involved. I imagine there's no real passion involved once you read the script and you see how this is actually gonna play out. This isn't the worst movie I've ever seen, not by a long shot, but as far as cynical marketing exercises go, this is, by far, the worst. Even worse than Cars 2. And, as an animated movie (even though this really isn't one), it's the worst I have ever seen from a major studio. I rarely ever count movies done by smaller, independent studios, because they don't have the resources. This is a terrible movie, you know how Lavar Ball 'speaks things into existence', well I'm gonna wish this movie into obscurity. Everyone who had the unfortunate task of watching this will forget they ever spent 80 minutes of their lives they will never get back with this piece of trash. I'm embarrassed for our species after this movie. Where's the Patrick Stewart facepalm meme when you need it?

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  jesse o Super Reviewer
• Oct 19, 2017

  I guess it had to happen, we live in a time now where nothing is sacred, nothing is safe from being milked dry, and anything is free game. We've seen it all from various obscure choices in the videogame archives; to [i]Barbie[/i] to [i]Thomas the Tank Engine[/i] to board games and to [i]Lego[/i]. They will make a movie out of bloody anything given half a chance. I'm half expecting an animated movie about the world of marbles to roll along anytime soon (yes I'm proud of that pun). I think its fair to say I wasn't expecting anything much from this movie, if anything I only saw it out of pure morbid curiosity. I was simply intrigued at how they could construct a narrative around some mobile phone app icons. And my God do they try their best here! They [b]really[/b] stretch and reach and twist that thin ass plot as best they can. Does it work? Not really no, but kudos for trying. I mean I can't deny there are some nice little touches here, its not all terrible. The emoji's live inside a phone (duh) which is owned by a young boy named Alex. Said boy is going through the usual pre-pubescent angst with girls and whatnot and of course being young he uses his phone a lot. Within the phone the emoji's dwell in the city of Textopolis (I like it), their daily job is to produce their emoticon or expression on demand (when Alex uses it). Gene is a 'meh' emoji but he can also make other expressions which is looked upon as freakish, or like having a rare disease. When Gene gets his chance to be used by Alex he has a nervous breakdown and fudges it up. He then finds himself listed for deletion because he is now deemed a malfunction. Gene must now flee the city with another has-been emoji to help him find a hacker to hopefully get himself fixed. So the plot is pretty much the same old shit we've many times before. The protagonist must go on the run to evade the antagonist and her henchmen (henchemoji's). Along the way the protagonist meets new friends that are considered losers basically; and in the end after numerous scrapes they all discover themselves and make friends (whilst saving the day). Its a standard plot mapped on top of this emoji concept. Despite that its still flippin' convoluted though, the nonsense they set up to explain how emoji's are used on a phone. Its kinda treated like a gameshow scenario where talented, experienced and obviously popular emoji's are used regularly (almost like a sports team). But if an emoji shows good promise or whatever then they get the chance to be 'promoted' onto the phones main app screen. It sounds ridiculous because it basically is. Then all the emoji's that aren't used anymore get lumped into a loser lounge type scenario. Very predictable but also somewhat daft as I'm sure most emoji's actually get used a fair bit the world over. Call me stupid but one of the main fun things about this movie was spotting all the different emoji's (sad I know). And sure enough they're all here, right down to the national flags. I quite like how the old emoticons are presented as old age pensioners, umm...that's about as clever as it gets really. Aside from that the entire movie plays out like a long TV advert for various smart phone apps like [i]Twitter[/i], [i]Candy Crush[/i], [i]Just Dance[/i] etc...The movie also uses every flippin' bit of computer jargon it can muster, in a very predictable and cringeworthy fashion. For instance, pirating is represented by...yep...pirates. A Trojan horse is...umm...a big horse. A firewall is a big fiery wall (ugh!!!), and a virus is a sick looking electronic bacteria (fuck me!). Add to that a whole bunch of nauseating pop songs, modern trendy teen lingo, various brands and voilà! The sidekick characters bland and unfunny (hi-five and a princess), again totally predictable. Alex decides to completely wipe his phone when a few apps play up, why not just uninstall them? When the phone is almost wiped Alex stops because of an unusual emoji?? (Gene pulling a stupid face). This emoji is then sent to the girl he has a crush on and she instantly likes him because of that?? Most of the emoji's in Textopolis are erased during this process, but they all come back perfectly OK when the phone is rebooted? No side affects from that? Overall the movie certainly isn't as bad as I thought it was gonna be (but its still quite bad). There are some kernels of a good idea hidden away within, the odd sparse highlight. But again overall its still very very basic, bland, uninspiring, unfunny, and it doesn't even look that great really. This was always gonna be an uphill battle simply because what the hell can you do with emoji's?? I stand by my kudos to all involved for actually managing to produce something that isn't a complete train wreck, but at the end of the day I think we can all agree with was a complete waste of time and money. Heck the aim seems to be to push young kids towards their phones more than ever. As if youngsters need that kind of encouragement these days.

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  Super Reviewer
• Oct 07, 2017

  Amidst some buoyant animation and some inventive flourishes, The Emoji Movie touts a story and style that is all too disconcerting to the future of film in general. Technology is no doubt a prominent force in our modern world almost to a fault. Instead of critiquing our use of phones and apps as our sole interest, The Emoji Movie practically worships the devices, insisting that we are only getting worse so we might as well embrace having our faces plastered to an electronic. There is no celebration of actual one-on-one dialogue (the entire climax revolves around sending a text to a girl), and there is no optimism about kids growing up in a technology driven landscape. It's rather cynical. Throw into that the fact that the film often is diverting, but grates the longer and longer it drags on with over the top vocal work and lowest common denominator jokes and music cues. The world it does present within the phone is colorful and clever enough, but the film never tries and find a way to not celebrate consumerism. It is a dispiriting animated film in almost all aspects. Wait for Pixar's next instead. Rating: 38

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  bradley j Super Reviewer