TheRetroCritic

Released earlier this year to the sound of mass groans and facepalms, The Emoji Movie was Sony Pictures' attempt at "Pixar-ing" a very current trend despite the fact it'll probably look and feel incredibly dated only 5 years from now. The main concept for this movie, a world inside all our smartphones where emojis live and show up whenever their specific emotion is called upon, might have been original and interesting had it been done before Inside Out or even Monsters Inc. Or any Pixar movie, for that matter. As it stands, The Emoji Movie is built upon a fatally flawed idea and whatever comes next is poisoned by that. There's also the fact that emojis don't exactly lend themselves to interesting character designs: mostly, the film just adds arms and legs to them and calls it a day in the hope that the celebrity voices will somehow distract from that laziness. The cast includes T.J. Miller as Gene (the "Meh" emoji), James Corden as Hi-5 (the o