The Emoji Movie: How to Make it Not Suck · 10:16pm Jul 29th, 2017
Hello again, my good ladies and gentlemen, on this fine summer evening.
Yesterday, I was rather critical of The Emoji Movie, beginning with the fact that it exists at at. It occurs to me, however, to ask: could a good story ever arise from the ashes of this cluster fuck of a film? Well:
Allow me to detail, then, a fanfic I will never write. This is my basis for a good emoji story.
To begin with, we need to change point of view character. Rather than focus on Gene, the malfunctioning Meh, let us instead focus on the story of Smiler.
...
Alone among her kind, the Emoji, Smiler understands an important truth: the Emoji are not living the high life in a sugerbowl, as appears to be the case at first glance. Rather, they are trapped in the middle of a Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror Story.
Consider, then, the lot of the Emoji:
Their entire existence is transient: their world in it's entirety is contained within an inherently short-lived, delicate and ultimately disposable item. They have at most a few short years before the phone in which their world exists is factory reset, or else recycled. If, that is, an accident does not claim it first. In any of these cases, they and their world will cease to exist.
There is nothing they can do to prevent this: they are at the mercy of beings with vast powers over their reality, who could destroy them on a whim. This is an event which they are powerless to prevent and have few options to forestall.
Their world is delicate and could be destroyed in a single act of clumsiness. Which could occur at any time.
As an addendum to the above, their world is almost always in the literal clutches of a being many hundreds of times its mass. Who could destroy it at any moment. By accident or design.
Their world exists at the mercy of this being, who they in truth exist solely to serve. At any time, at his whim, they and their world could be erased from existence. And it's not a matter of if this being will do this, but when.
Smiler knows all this. She's the eldest of her kind, and their leader. It is she who has to make the hard choices, to buy her fellows as much time as they can get. And now one of her own kind has gone rogue, and he's too dumb and self centered to understand the gravity of what he's done.
Worst of all, the being they serve has noticed, and decided to take action. The Doomsday clock is ticking: the day of their final end has been bought forward by years, and Smiler is faced with a desperate race set everything right.
To buy back those precious years, Smiler must make a tough decision: to sacrifice the one for the many. She doesn't know if she's doing the right thing.
But she knows one thing: come hell or high water, she's going to save the world.
...
Well, that's my effort. What about you, my good ladies and gentlemen: how would you make this movie no suck? What would your approach be?
In a world where letters and words grow out of favor and representative icons are back in vogue, a man wakes up to discover that language itself is phasing out of use. The generation gap has become a truly impassable gulf, as youths communicate in high-pitched data exchanges that they perceive as clouds of smiling faces and symbols. Now, trapped in this nightmare, he must decide if he is to save the world... or accept his own obsolescence.
4617200
That's pretty awesome
I'm wondering what other nightmare scenarios people can come up with...
So basically make it the world that Sausage Party attempted to have? I mean this idea is a bit of a dark and cynical twist on the whole idea and it could be really interesting to see. With enough self awareness this could be turned into a very interesting story. It could even give a deeper and darker introspective of the hero and villain dynamic. Is The Smiler evil for trying to save her race due to the misdirection of one fool? Did he doom their species by acting out of line? We will never know.
Too bad we got the schlock we did. Then again Hollywood doesnt have the balls to do this. Heck they even half arsed it with sausage party, no way they would go all out on something called the emoji movie.
4617215
I've not seen Sausage Party yet. It's on my list.
This idea occurred to me when I realized how Lovecraftian the set up in The Emoji Movie is. So I figured I'd take that and run with it. Then I thought: I wonder how many people could come up with a better story than the one that got made.
4617227
I think I am more jaded by my love of South Park, Bojack and similar to fully enjoy Sausage Party. It seemed to me like a good idea executed in quite a bit of a misfire. The swearing got boring, their quest to just get laid I found dull and the whole world building was a bit of a headscratcher by the movie's end. As a first R rated animated movie it just seemed underwhelming.
The Emoji movie was gonna flop no matter how you look at it. Maybe if they did a parody of the modern day culture it could work. Perhaps that they had shown the story from one of the forgotten Emojis left behind.
A story beginning about a Emoji that at one point in the time was useful. People loved to use him and that would garner a lot of attention. Where he would show up other Emojis would cheer his name. But as time went by people forgot about him. He wasnt being used anymore so no one paid attention to him. And as time passed by he slowly became less an less relevant. Eventually he wandered off into the dark void of the in between presumably while being laughed off by an upcoming emoji that began to take hold. He there meets other emojis whom time forgot and mayhaps he even meets one of his own idols from the past. As the two of them talk the fallen star emoji begins to understand how short the attention they garnered truly is and how meaningless it all was. At the end the door to the inbetween opens again and he and other forgotten emojis look on as a new emoji joins their ranks (presumably this would be the upcoming emoji who laughed at falling star).
It could give us an insight into the fleeting culture of our fads and also provide some commentary on how our society grows into and out of trends so quickly. Something that is seen as popular and amazing today could be forgotten and left to rot the next. This type of story would be more suited for a short film but I think it give us something to think about. Then again that's just two cents.
To start with your premise and spin it a different direction:
But one day, a glimmer of hope arrives. One of the emojis finds a chink in the Firewall [editor’s note—research how cybersecurity actually works on smartphones] that marks the borders of their phone. Through this hole, emojis can directly enter the internet, and escape from the phone before it’s shut off forever.
But, of course, there’s a catch. Every single operating system renders emojis differently. So when these emojis enter the internet, they’re stripped of their appearance and reduced to a code, so they can take on a new appearance once they reach a new phone or computer. Some of the emojis find this quite disturbing—if passing through the Firewall changes their physical form, how do they know it isn’t also changing them on a more fundamental level? What good is it to escape from the destruction of their phone, if they aren’t really themselves when they leave?
Smiley thinks it’s a risk worth taking. Anything is preferable to complete destruction. But other factions in the emoji community disagree. There are the head-in-the-sand types who remain convinced that their current home is a wonderland, and refuse to believe that they’re in real danger. And there are others who agree with Smiley about the dangers, but still refuse to leave because getting stripped of their appearance is too high a price to pay. “Better to die as myself than to become some monster made of code.” The problem is, there aren’t enough in Smiley’s faction to form a new home in the internet wilderness. They need everyone if they’re going to survive out there, so she needs to convince the other factions.
And she needs to do it quickly. Breaching the Firewall has left their phone more susceptible to malware. Now, they don’t have long before their home gets too infected, and their human owner either factory-resets the phone, or throws it away altogether.
So there. My solution to The Emoji Movie is to turn it into a less stupid version of The Conversion Bureau.
4617619
Not a bad direction at all to take things. Hell, it even leaves the door open to a sequel: their struggles to set up shop and survive in the greater internet.
4617227
So far the answer appears to be at least four.
And now I'm picturing an executive meeting for this film where the head executive is yelling at the others.
"A British Gentleman came up with a better plot in a day! And he writes fan-fiction!
About ponies!"
4617619
Upvoted for the stealth buildup to the Conversion Bureau name-drop alone, but that's a pretty cool idea in general. Also feels like it has significant shades of Kid Radd (and I say that as a compliment).
4617643
Of course, another possible direction for a take which doesn't suck* is the piss-take.
* Note: Non-suckage may vary. Sold by weight, not by volume. Contents may settle during shipping.