As the language of kings and titans swiftly devolves into a pitiful miasma of crass misspellings and childish symbology, we as a people have a responsibility to ask ourselves: can anything stop the onslaught of emojis? Can anything make these ubiquitous happy faces and poo piles with eyes seem a lot less cool, and hopefully ruin them forever?
The answer may have been provided earlier today, when Sony Pictures announced that they won a bidding war – a bidding war – over the rights to Emoji, a new film about emojis written by Eric Siegel (Men at Work) and Rob McElhenney, who will also direct the film. McElhenney’s resumé includes the animated features Igor and Lilo & Stich 2: Stitch Has a Glitch, to be of similar quality.
While the success of The LEGO Movie – a blatant advertisement that just happened to be smartly written and extremely popular – has taught us never to judge an obvious cash grab before we’ve actually seen it, the talent behind Emojis just doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence that this will be an ingenious pop culture satire. Sony Pictures Animation doesn’t inspire much confidence either. Their collaborations with Aardman (which include Arthur Christmas and Pirates! Band of Misfits) notwithstanding, this is the studio that brought us the two live-action/animation hybrid Smurf movies, and the less said about them the better.
Then again, this emoji movie might be a win/win for audiences. If it’s a good movie that would be fantastic, but if it’s a terrible flop then maybe, just maybe, emojis will have been besmirched, and people will start using actual words to talk to each other once again, and the poetry of human language might actually be saved.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
