The Emoji Movie

An animated film featuring anthropomorphic emojis like Poop and High Five is probably not the best, um, vessel for a parody of a dystopian series in which fertile women are forced to procreate with wealthy men. But that’s exactly what happened late yesterday afternoon, when the marketing for The Emoji Movie took a decidedly dark and exceedingly ill-advised turn. In a tweet that has since been deleted, the film’s official account shared a promotional photo parodying The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s acclaimed series adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s classic novel. Unsurprisingly (and delightfully), the public response was swift and savage.

Will The Emoji Movie be horrible? We just don’t know. The premise of “Toy Story, but with the little pictorial icons that live inside your smartphone” sure sounds like something that an executive with an analytics page for a heart would come up with, but it’s the critic’s responsibility to reserve judgement until the film can be seen in full. At least today brings us a bite-sized sample of The Emoji Movie with a new trailer that contains both a painfully out-of-fashion “Bye, Felicia” reference and a sincerely humorous joke about forgotten phone passwords. So it’s really anyone’s guess, at this point.

Studios these days knows no bounds when it comes to anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. The objects in The Emoji Movie aren’t even real — merely code-based pictograms that live on the surface of your phone screen. But that won’t stop Sony, determined to make you feel emotions for the very things meant to stand in for emotions in the first place...

When it was first announced, The Emoji Movie sounded like a joke — the inevitable apex of big budget studio movies based on products least likely to inspire a feature-length narrative. But Sony Pictures Animation has followed through on its threat to unleash an animated adventure featuring a walking and talking poop emoji, and we have the first teaser trailer to prove it.