The Emoji Movie (2017) and New Worlds Within Our World

Cinema is a place where endless new worlds are imaginable. There could be far off, distant planets and solar systems that hold countless stories to entertain. The stories could come from underwater or in the air. There could be unknown islands and foreign countries. But what about going in a different direction? What about turning something that wouldn’t normally be a world into one? Children’s movies do that all the time.

The thing about a kids’ movie is that the people behind them are willing to give anything a personality and tell its story. Toy Story took the toys that kids would play with as they were growing up and turned them into fully formed characters. These characters interacted with each other, hid their life from the humans so that they couldn’t be found out, and went on adventures. Frozen brought a snowman to life. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer made the reindeer into the characters that were followed. Anything can become the main character in a kids’ movie.

Take The Emoji Movie, for example. The majority of the movie took place within a phone. Sure, there were scenes with the kid who owned the phone, but the story was about what was happening within the phone. Gene (T.J. Miller) was a meh emoji trying to secure his job as being the meh that ended up in his phone’s text messages. When Smiler (Maya Rudolph) found out that Gene had a malfunction that allowed him to make many faces, she wanted to destroy him. Gene teamed up with Hi-5 (James Corden) to find a hacker named Jailbreak (Anna Faris) and get to the cloud to be reprogrammed into a proper meh.

The world that was brought to life with The Emoji Movie was the world of the cell phone. The emojis were given personalities and lived in their own texting city. Their jobs revolved around providing the best texting quality that they could to the boy who owned the phone. It ain’t much, but it’s honest work. The city had a class system within it as well, which depended on the popularity of the emojis that were being used. The popular ones got into the nightclub area while the unpopular, forgotten emojis (which included the eggplant, for some reason) went to the basement. It was like the popular kids and the nerds.

The city wasn’t the only part of the phone that got the world building experience in The Emoji Movie. When Gene ran away with Hi-5, they entered the desktop of the phone. It was sort of like a well-planned grid city, where each block was a tower that housed one of the apps on the phone. The characters could travel down the roads and enter whatever apps they wanted to. Each of the apps was designed like its own specific smaller world. The Just Dance app was a giant dance floor over a pit, with a hologram host. The Spotify app was like traversing rivers. They rode a boat down the soundwaves. The pirate app was a dive bar town where it was easy to find the seediest characters in the phone. Every app was a world within the larger world of the phone within the larger world of the human world.

This wasn’t the only instance in film history of an animated film building a world around something that wouldn’t normally be thought of in this way. There were a few other films in the 2010s alone that did the same sort of thing. One of them was Wreck-It Ralph. The main character was the villain of a video game called Fix-It Felix Jr. In the game, Felix would fix things while Ralph tried to wreck them. It was a pretty simple concept. However, Ralph didn’t want to be the villain anymore. He wanted to be a hero. Thus, his journey to find his heroic role began.

Much like with The Emoji Movie, there was a bigger world to Wreck-It Ralph than just the game he was a part of. Fix-It Felix Jr. was one of many games in an arcade. A bunch of the games, including Fix-It Felix Jr., were connected to the same power strip. The characters could travel down their power cords to the strip, and an area called Game Central Station. They could interact with one another before going back to their games and their programmed roles. Ralph went on an adventure to different games because he didn’t like always being the bad guy, and he needed to find himself.

The world built in Wreck-It Ralph wasn’t one that people would normally think of as a world in which to tell a story. There were video game movies before it, sure, but they were adaptations of video games. Wreck-It Ralph was a story about video games set in an unseen world in an arcade, where a bunch of arcade games were connected. It built a world where the games were all a part of a community. And it told a story in this newfound world.

Inside Out did the same sort of thing. It took a concept that people knew about, this time emotions, and built a world around the concept in order to tell a story. Inside a girl’s head was a control centre where five different emotions helped the girl to share her feelings with the world around her. The five emotions were joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. They would push buttons on a control board to push her emotional state in the direction they felt was right.

This control centre was a new world that people hadn’t considered as a place to tell a story. Nobody had thought that a person’s emotions could be characterized in a way that they could become the protagonists and antagonists for a conflict. Sure, people have conflicting emotions about all kinds of things, but that was never considered a way to tell an adventure story. That’s what Inside Out managed to do. Joy and Sadness were thrown from the control centre into the memory banks of the human mind and had to find their way back to the control centre. It was a whole unseen world being brought to the surface through a kids’ movie.

One final animated kids’ movie that should be noted for the new world it built in a place that wouldn’t normally be a world is The Hero of Color City. It was a movie about what crayons did in their box after people were done using them. Inside the box was a world where the crayons lived. It was like a big city with a rolling country landscape beyond the city limits. That country landscape was much like the world from a fantasy movie and the crayon characters travelled through it to stop two unfinished drawings from destroying their world.

The world building in The Hero of Color City was within the crayon box. No human was going to be able to witness that world. It was a world within our world that was completely foreign to us. It was colorful and filled imagination, much like the drawings that a child creates with crayons. It was a world built out of something that most children did, create their own imagined worlds on blank pages as they filled them with wax etchings.

Each of the four movies managed to create a new world within our world. The characters weren’t in a world that a human could enter and be a part of. The worlds were built within the human world, but the humans couldn’t be in those worlds. No human was going to be inside the software of the phone where the emojis lived in The Emoji Movie. People could not enter the video games of Wreck-It Ralph and interact with the characters. Nobody was going to be setting their eyes on the control centre of Inside Out or jumping into the crayon box world of The Hero of Color City. People have their own world and these movie characters had one within it that the people weren’t a part of.

Kids’ movies are the perfect place for new worlds to be brought to life. The imaginations of children are unending. They go on forever and come up with new things all the time. Children’s movies take inspiration from the kids who watch them. Many times, the worlds are outward. But the worlds within worlds are a great source of storytelling as well. Whenever kids play with their toys, they’re creating new worlds and new characters. The adults behind movies do the same thing, just through a bigger, more public platform. And the results can be magical or a downright disaster. That’s up to the viewer to decide. I think these worlds are interesting enough to warrant being around.

These notes are warranted as well:

• The Emoji Movie featured the voice of Phil LaMarr, who worked on Beverly Hills Chihuahua 3: Viva La Fiesta! (week 70) and Bio-Dome (week 124).
• Laraine Newman was a part of The Emoji Movie cast. She was also in Jingle All the Way (week 160) and Perfect (week 195).
• Three actors from The Hero of Color City (week 114), which was mentioned in this post, were in The Emoji Movie. They were Elizabeth Daily, Jess Harnell, and Tara Strong.
• The Emoji Movie featured two actors from New Year’s Eve (week 57). They were Jake T. Austin and Sofia Vergara.
• There were also two actors from Son of the Mask (week 207) in The Emoji Movie. They were Mona Marshall and Steven Wright.
• Fred Tatasciore was in The Emoji Movie after showing up in Zombeavers (week 142).
• Did you hear Bob Bergen’s voice in The Emoji Movie? You may have recognized it from Foodfight! (week 143).
• Date Movie (week 164) featured Jennifer Coolidge, as did The Emoji Movie.
• Alicyn Packard lent her voice to both Chop Kick Panda (week 167) and The Emoji Movie.
• Free Birds (week 209) had Carlos Alazraqui in it. So did The Emoji Movie.
• The Emoji Movie was the second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance of Anna Faris, who was in Movie 43 (week 243).
• Finally, Eric Bauza made a quick turnaround. He was in The Emoji Movie, only a couple weeks after The Banana Splits Movie (week 371).
• Have you seen The Emoji Movie? What did you think about it? Did you think they did a good job with the world building? Are there any other movies that build a hidden world within the world like these did? Let me know on Twitter in the comments.
• You can find me on Twitter or in the comments if you want to leave a suggestion for a movie I should be watching as part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies. I’ll take any suggestion into consideration. I’m always looking for movies I might not know about that I can add to the schedule.
• Check out the Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. There’s usually something fun there that you can see.
• That’s the post for this week. Now we get to look forward to the next one. In one week, I’ll be dipping into a box set that I have of low-to-no budget movies. There’s a movie called Las Vegas Bloodbath that will be the topic of next week’s post. I hope you’ll join be for it because it should be fun. See you then.