That somebody was writer-director Tony Leondis, who honestly believed that The Emoji Movie was going to be his Toy Story, touching hearts and minds and making audiences weep with joy at the complicated beauty of life.
Yes, The Emoji Movie – a movie that has become practically synonymous with crass commercialism and contempt for young audiences – was an intensely personal project for its creator. Leondis wanted to make a movie that connected with how he felt as a lonely gay kid growing up in the 1970s and 80s, being unable to ever be the thing he was “supposed to” be. He was originally going to have emojis come to life in the human world, but got much more excited thinking about the animated possibilities of the digital world inside a smartphone. He researched the history of emoji development and incorporated it into his script. In other words, Leondis was pumped to make The Emoji Movie, and Sony Pictures was pumped to win the bidding war for production rights. After they secured said rights, they fast-tracked the movie into production to avoid their phone technology becoming dated too quickly. The Empire State Building was lit in yellow. Poop Emoji plushies flooded toy store shelves. And moviegoers showed up, to the tune of $217 million at the box office against a $50 million budget.
But no one actually thought it was any good. Critics flew into rages upon seeing it, with Guardian critic Charles Bramesco going so far as to call it “insidious evil” for being a feature-length ad for smartphone apps targeted at children. When people are comparing your movie negatively to Bee Movie, you know you’ve lost the crowd. And the Razzies dutifully swept in to lap up the carnage, which included the directing career of Tony Leondis. He has not appeared in the film industry, in any role, since the release of The Emoji Movie. That’s quite a sentence in director jail for a man who raked in over $100 million on a single movie. His movie must have really bit the big one, huh?
THE STORY
And yet – and I am as surprised as anyone by what I’m about to say, for I was dreading the day The Emoji Movie would appear in the Raspberry Picker – it did not. Don’t mistake me, it’s not a good movie. But as seems to happen pretty reliably with movies deemed the Worst, I’d been led to expect a reprehensible garbage fire of a movie, and the fact that I came away thinking “come on, it’s not that bad” felt like a Trojan Horse-level victory for poor Tony Leondis.
Please keep that in mind as I explain this movie, because the column will be 20,000 words if I keep having to write variations on “I promise this is not quite as stupid as it sounds.”
Mostly, but not entirely.
TJ Miller plays an emoji, TJ Miller. Wikipedia tells me this emoji is named “Gene,” but this character is indistinguishable from TJ Miller’s other notable roles despite being an animated yellow bouncy ball with a face, so it’s TJ Miller. TJ Miller is a “meh” emoji who lives inside the texting app, “Textopolis,” of the smartphone of a teenage boy named Alex (Jake T. Austin), who is absolutely the poor man’s Riley from Inside Out. We hang out with Alex and his friends, including his crush Addie McCallister (Tati Gabrielle) during the brief moments that we regroup in the Real World, and if I didn’t know better, I would think they were intended as mean-spirited Baby Boomer parodies of teenagers suffering from smartphone-induced psychosis. They literally trip over their own feet because they are too busy staring at their phones. They develop heart palpitations over selecting the best possible emojis for their random brain firings.
He’s definitely eyeballing the bomb.
For one glorious moment, I thought The Emoji Movie might be setting up a satire of smartphone-based communication. You see, the plot gets rolling because TJ Miller is a defective “meh” emoji. He can make a whole range of different faces, even though he should only be able to “meh,” much to the consternation of his parents Mel (Steven Wright) and Mary Meh (Jennifer Coolidge). (I now invite you to think about the logistics of emoji courtship and reproduction on your own time.) TJ’s dying for a chance to be in the “cube,” the active panel of emojis from which Alex can select for his texts, but Mel and Mary fear that his inability to control his face will lead to him making a hash of it. I bet you can’t guess who turns out to be right!
TJ, of course, makes a total hash of it, causing Alex to send Addie a panicked face instead of a “meh” face as part of a text, and causing Addie to regard Alex as a dysfunctional geektastic dweeb. See, this is where I got excited. Surely, I thought, the movie can’t seriously think we’re going to be invested in whether two teenagers can text each other their intended emojis? Surely that can’t be the actual basis for the stakes of this film? Surely this is some wry commentary on how emojis have become cheap digital replacements for the communication of real human feelings, and the movie will end with Alex triumphantly throwing his phone in the garbage and marching up to Addie to confess his feelings to her face? But no, I am somewhat horrified to realize, the movie is playing those stakes entirely straight. We are supposed to be concerned that, because TJ doesn’t look like the right emoji, Alex might reset his phone and replace all the emojis inside with new emojis. And that would be bad, because, um…because we’re emotionally attached to these emojis? Or something?
THIS IS A TRAGEDY! THESE THOUGHTS ARE MAKING YOU SAD!
So TJ is in trouble because Alex might wipe the phone if he’s not happy with the emojis’ performance, and he has drawn the wrath of emoji boss Smiler (Maya Rudolph), who is determined to eliminate him from the program so that her world can be saved, which, uh, sounds reasonable to me, but I didn’t write The Emoji Movie. TJ runs off with a high-five emoji (James Corden) who wants to regain his prior coveted spot in Alex’s “favorites” section (again, how is this not a satire?) and Jailbreak (Anna Faris), a mysterious “hacker” emoji who promises she can reprogram TJ into a proper “meh” and whose secret identity is definitely not incredibly obvious from the moment she is introduced. Jailbreak’s job is to win the movie some feminism points by kvetching about the limited opportunities available to female emojis in Textopolis, when she isn’t having boring repeat meet-cutes with TJ.
Point being, TJ needs to go discover who he was meant to be before Alex goes to his appointment to reset his phone, or all the emojis will be erased, to the raucous applause of a grateful world. I mean, the tears. There will definitely be tears.
THE BAD
If I’m not careful, I may simply end up repeating much of the “story” section here, because dear God, the story. But even more than the story, the worldbuilding.
The Emoji Movie is an apocalyptic botch of worldbuilding. In this world, emojis are alive and have feelings, but also they don’t, and have a civilization outside of the control of the phone’s user, but also the user controls them, and there are multiples of some emojis, but only one of those is ever in the cube, so the others just…wander around Textopolis, which by the way has nightclubs and lounges and houses, and also very noticeably does not contain letters and numbers. And the emojis can move around to different apps on the phone and become part of them, which was already a stretch when Wreck-it Ralph tried it with video game characters and just makes anti-sense here. If TJ/Gene can’t function as a “meh,” why can’t he just be forced to lay low under the surface of Textopolis, or hide out in another unobtrusive app, making no noise and pretending he’s not there? Don’t think too hard about any aspect of this movie, because it will give you a nervous breakdown.
I could forgive and forget much of this lunacy, though, if it were in service of good jokes. Make sure you’re sitting down now, because I have to tell you that, shockingly, The Emoji Movie is not bursting with funny jokes. James Corden is never an actor I am happy to see in a credits list, but here he is a particular liability, because his tendency to fill the room demands that we pay special attention to Hi-5’s miserably unfunny jokes. For example, a bit that involves him repeatedly throwing up and reingesting a candy corn. Really.
I wouldn’t lie to you about this.
He also leads a bit about a section of Textopolis called the “loser lounge” where the emojis no one ever uses go to hang out, and here’s where you know Leondis and his team had no idea what they were talking about, because the eggplant emoji is conspicuously present. I know you want a PG rating, kids, but let’s not wear our lack of emoji lore knowledge on our sleeves if we’re going to insist on making The Emoji Movie.
Where the movie really does itself in, though, is in the very element that strengthens most good-bad movies: its belief in itself. The Emoji Movie really, truly believes with all its ❤️that we will get invested in the weird nonsensical world of emojis that none of us can bring ourselves to accept because we have never once imagined such a thing ourselves. It believes that we will get invested in its terrible characters and their pathetic, meaningless struggles. It believes that we will be so overcome with love that we will forget the time that the film devoted nearly fifteen minutes of runtime to advertising Candy Crush.
Yes, of course Candy Crush made a special promotional level for the movie.
So instead of elevating the film, The Emoji Movie’s plucky go-getterness just makes it feel more pathetic than it would otherwise. It’s the pluck of a businessman who, when wasted, believes himself a god of karaoke. When Addie flutters her eyelashes at Alex and says “wow, that’s a really cool emoji” like Alex has just hit her with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, we are meant to read this as a triumph of love and connection and authenticity. How can we do this? I try to meet movies where they are, I really do, but how can we even attempt to meet this movie where it is when it’s this delusional?
The movie is also just plain ugly, an aggressive, overbright, cluttered zoo of shapes and colors that also feels the need to flaunt its ugliness at every turn. Particularly offensive to the eyes is Smiler, whose buggy eyes and Gary Busey teeth make my face hurt and would be perfectly fine if the movie were not so freaking earnest and convinced of its own beauty and goodness. Emoji Movie, I am on my knees begging you as a viewer who is very vulnerable to extreme misguided earnestness: please just be what you really are. You are crass, nasty, and shallow. Embrace it. Stop trying to be what you can’t be.
Let society keep you down, just this once.
Also, the less said about Patrick Stewart’s poop emoji cameo, the better, but that man needs to develop a sense of shame.
Behold the single worst texture anyone has ever intentionally created for an animated movie.
THE GOOD
So yes, this is all extraordinarily stupid (though again, I must emphasize, not quite as stupid as it sounds) and crass and pandering to the most shallow, vapid elements of 21st-century Western culture. None of it has any right whatsoever to work. It should be an abject disgrace ashamed to call itself a movie. Perhaps because of that, I am overrating the parts of the movie that do sort of work. On the other hand, when something succeeds so hard against such insurmountable odds, maybe it deserves a little overrating.
For example, Steven Wright and Jennifer Coolidge as Mel and Mary are the one element of the film that hits its mark spot-on. Wright’s deadpan delivery is an inspired match for an emotionless character, undermined only slightly by Coolidge’s even better performance; she treats Mary’s “meh” state as feeling perpetually, hyperdramatically overwhelmed by the state of her world, to the point where she can no longer feel anything about any of it. It feels very strange for me to say that a pair of ugly yellow spheres have “chemistry,” but they do, and the film rewards them with the choice to spend much more time on them than is strictly necessary for the story. I hated the mid-movie “twist” that Mel is also a defective multi-feeling emoji in part because Wright and Coolidge had been so much fun together as an elderly couple who are just so over everyone and everything. Honestly, now that I’m thinking about it, one entire star of my eventual rating might be for Mel and Mary. In a world fallen enough that The Emoji Movie exists but exalted enough that The Emoji Movie actually crosses over into goodness, Mel and Mary would be the main characters and the film would be a surreal commentary on the way excessive time on the Internet slowly saps you of your ability to feel.
What did you do today, dear? I looked at Twitter for six hours.
I also laughed more than I should have at a joke about punctuation-based emoticons being Textopolis’s equivalent of senior citizens, and far more than I should have at one of them shouting “my colon!” after TJ knocks it over. Look, it was way funnier than everything involving the actual poop emoji.
In general, The Emoji Movie’s unearned earnestness is a detriment, because a movie this cynical really should lean into its cynicism as hard as it can. On the other hand, I can’t get angry at Tony Leondis’s misguided but genuine belief that he was making something lovely and even profound. Every so often, and at the most jarring times – the middle of a mid-movie dance break inside the Just Dance app, for example, where TJ and Jailbreak discover their growing attraction to each other through the power of rhythm games and Christina Aguilera – that sincerity reaches out and boops our noses in a momentarily disorienting way. Said dance break absolutely should not be fun to watch, but it is. It’s boppy and pleasingly geometric and upbeat and makes good use of the film’s oversaturated colors and off-putting character designs. It shouts “someone believed in us!” And while I was never quite convinced to believe in it as well, for those periodic fleeting moments, I at least understood why Tony Leondis did.
Okay, yes, this is hideous, but it’s…I don’t know, hideous in a sort of disarming way?
With a movie like The Emoji Movie, it’s a bit pointless and even a bit cruel to look at how it measures up to the titans of its genre. If I think too hard about the degradation of popular animated film between Pinocchio and now, I might just stop watching movies to end the pain. Instead, we should also consider: in an ideal world, such a movie would not exist, but in our sinful fallen world where it does, how good was it possibly going to be, and how close does this version come to hitting that ceiling? I say that it comes quite close. I only experienced a few brief urges to throw something at my TV or kill Patrick Stewart. Some characters charmed me, and some jokes made me smile. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but nor would I scream “no, anything but that!” if I were forced to watch it again. It’s not good; it’s not horrid beyond measure. It just sort of exists in its own space divorced from reality, perhaps symptomatic of our cultural rot but doing no particular harm on its own. When you think about it, could you ask for a more accurate cinematic representation of the emoji? 😑
Quality of Movie: 2 / 5. “Better than it could have been” still doesn’t mean “good.”
Quality of Experience: 2 / 5. However, “better than it could have been” does mean “mildly entertaining in places and never made me wish I were dead.”
Did the Razzies Get it Right? The other nominees from 2017 were Baywatch, The Mummy, Fifty Shades Darker, and Transformers: The Last Knight. Of these, I have only seen Fifty Shades Darker, which was about as promising as The Emoji Movie and ended up being about as good. The Mummy was directed by vampire of talent and joy Alex Kurtzmann, so it probably sucks. Not nominated were Smurfs: The Lost Village, The House, and Leatherface, all of which I hated much more than The Emoji Movie. All in all, an uninspiring year in bad movies, and Wilson & Co. didn’t have much to work with unless they dove into the really cheap and stinky dumpsters.
You can read Tim’s review of The Emoji Movie here!
Want to pick more Raspberries? Check outthe rest of the columns in this series!
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.
