A horrifying blend of ugliness and cynicism
Imagine Pixar’s Inside Out spliced with David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, if it had actually been made by the evil corporation in Videodrome. That’s about the measure of The Emoji Movie, the horrifying film from Sony Pictures Animation, which is about nine-tenths product placement, at least 15-tenths abysmal, and pulsates with molten cynicism on every level.
This sounds like an overstatement. But it’s not the half of it. Regular readers of The Daily Telegraph may know that I’m an easy mark when it comes to crying at children’s films: Inside Out set me off within 31 seconds, which remains the record. But The Emoji Movie is, I think, the first family film during which I’ve cried in pure dismay.
The story of a plucky young text message icon who saves the world with the help of various trademarked, money-spinning apps like Spotify and Candy Crush is so monstrously soulless, so spiritually rancid, that I defy anyone without a vested financial interest to watch the thing without experiencing similar stabs of disgust. The film largely takes place within the digital architecture of a teenage boy’s smartphone, where the emoji, a race of mono-emotional glyphs, reside in Textopolis – which is, as you might have guessed, a threadbare copy of Monstropolis from Monsters Inc. The script, by director Tony Leondis, Eric Siegel and Mike White, offers a vapid account of the emojis’ existence.
During working hours, they wait on an enormous Celebrity Squares-style grid until they’re selected by the phone’s owner – at which point they must express their “defining” emotion, which is scanned and then relayed to the smartphone’s screen. You might imagine this would yield ample opportunity for celebrity voice cameos, and maybe that was the intention, but in the end there’s one: a barely audible Patrick Stewart plays a smirking dollop of excrement, Poop.
Enter Gene (TJ Miller), an apathetic “meh” emoji who’s actually anything but indifferent to everyday emoji life. He’s selected for deletion by Smiler (Maya Rudolph), a kind of grinning dictator, and flees the city in the hope of reaching The Cloud, an abstract realm where he can have conflicting emotions programmed out of him and thereby be rendered safe for work. He’s joined by Hi-5, a hand with eyes, a mouth voiced by James Corden, and Jailbreak (Anna Faris), a miserably obvious copy of the Wyldstyle character from The Lego Movie.
Hollow efforts are made to paint sites such as Facebook and Youtube as life-improving services, while there’s zero acknowledgement of the stresses of online life for young people: trolls are just comedy bogeymen, and the story glibly and dishonestly insists that “connecting” online can yield only real-world benefits. As dismal to contemplate as it is horrendous to look at, there aren’t enough Patrick Stewartvoiced emojis in the world to express what an ugly, artless exercise this is. RC