Good news for fans of dubious film tie-ins that nobody asked for: there’s now a full trailer available for Sony’s The Emoji Movie. To be fair, this one is a bit more entertaining than the teaser trailer, which amounted to one joke extended over a minute. This makes it appear that there will be at least four or five jokes stretched over the 90 or so minutes the film will likely endure for.
The original post from the teaser trailer release continues below.
I woke up this morning blissfully unaware that there was a feature film based on emoji coming out next year. Now I know that there is, and have watched the teaser trailer, any optimism that 2017 will be somehow better than 2016 is slowly ebbing from my body.
Actually, that’s a bit unfair. You probably come to a film about emojis with incredibly low expectations, and good news: those expectations are just about met. I mean, it’s nicely animated, it contains maybe four or five jokes (depending on how generous you are in your definition of “joke”), and it has sound. It doesn’t crash your computer, or unleash some kind of unspeakable evil like in The Ring. In terms of hitting the bare minimum requirements of a cinematic trailer, it’s doing okay, I guess.
The broader question perhaps is “why?” Why does this film exist? Why would anyone want to see it? Why would any actor sign up to it? I suppose that given emojis exist on every phone, they’re at least universal, but I’m not convinced anyone wants to put any more personality on to them than that that is already drawn on to their little cartoon faces.
The film’s director, Tony Leondis, unsurprisingly disagrees, telling EW: “When you’re trying to make an animated movie, the best thing is to find that familiar thing everyone’s familiar with but no-one really thinks about in this way.”
“From my niece to my grandmother, they send emojis. It connects us. In this technological world, we still find ways to connect as human beings, and I think that’s what emojis do.”
More cynically, perhaps, it also feels like an opportunity for mobile apps to get a bunch of free (or possibly costly) publicity. The film will feature emojis riding Spotify streams and struggling with Candy Crush Saga, apparently.
The plot of the film tries desperately to fight against the one-dimensional personalities that define each emoji, with the main character a malfunctioning “meh” emoji that can somehow display more than a single emotion. I think we can all already see the saccharine conclusions the film is moving towards without needing to watch the whole film.
Still, if there’s one tiny positive to be taken from the trailer, it’s this: at least they’ve gone with the clean iPhone and WhatsApp style of emoji, rather than the weird melty Android variety, or the horrifying Samsung ones.
That would be a surefire way to get an 18 rating and ensure that even fewer people will end up bothering to watch when it launches next August.
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