I was invited by Sony to preview some snippets of the upcoming animated film, The Emoji Movie, and was highly entertained! I cannot wait to see it in its entirety!
The Emoji Movie unlocks the never-before-seen secret world inside your smartphone. Hidden within the messaging app is Textopolis, a bustling city where all your favorite emojis live, hoping to be selected by the phone’s user. In this world, each emoji has only one facial expression – except for Gene (T.J. Miller), an exuberant emoji who was born without a filter and is bursting with multiple expressions. Determined to become “normal” like the other emojis, Gene enlists the help of his handy best friend Hi-5 (James Corden) and the notorious code breaker emoji Jailbreak (Anna Faris). Together, they embark on an epic “app-venture” through the apps on the phone, each its own wild and fun world, to find the Code that will fix Gene. But when a greater danger threatens the phone, the fate of all emojis depends on these three unlikely friends who must save their world before it’s deleted forever.
The owner of the phone with all these active emojis is Alex, voiced by Jake T. Austin. As the parent of a teenage high school student, this story hit started to hit home! These kids always have their phones in their hand and emojis help them communicate with out spelling out words! Or even using words! This is my exact fear, that my son’s generation is going to lose the ability to use language! OK, I may have gone overboard.
After we viewed some snippets of the movie we were able to interview some of the cast. First up was Jake T. Austin, what a thrill it was to meet this young man who already has an extensive resume! He was Dora’s cousin Diego! We used to watch that all the time! He was in The Wizards of Waverly Place! And he was in one of my favorite TV shows, The Fosters. Lastly, he went to high school with my niece and nephew. He was one and two years behind them respectively, but everyone knew him because he was on TV.
He was the nicest guy.
This is a movie about phone apps, so naturally one of our questions for Jake was, What are your favorite apps? His first answer was one I never heard of, Shazam. It is music related so that is one I have to ask my musical son about! He also said that Instagram and Twitter round out his top three. He has followers that number in the millions on those two, so I can see why they are in the top!
Jake enjoyed voicing Alex, a teenager who is trying to get through high school, and trying to get a date! All the while his phone apps are trying to stay alive! The movie was not completed when we got to see these snippets, but there was enough to show that made me want more, the multiple story lines were each hilarious in their own right!
I thanked Jake for his role in educating me as the parent of a teenager! I know my high school aged son is on his phone a lot, I just never imagined that there was so much non-verbal (written) communication! And I have since had a look through and found that some of his social media friends do not have their names on the various messaging apps, they only use emojis. That is something all of us parents need to investigate, who is this person I saw on my son’s phone who’s name is just four heart emojis! I have to know! And what are they saying when their messages are all in emojis? From the movie I now know what the emojis are thinking, but what are these teenagers like Jake’s character thinking!
The movie is fun and relevant for all ages. And very entertaining in a more sophisticated manner because it is sort of a psychological look into the mind of an emoji. The hilarious cast also works perfectly to make this a must see movie!
Again, I cannot wait to see this movie in its entirety!
I haven’t seen the trailer for this, but just the name itself makes me want to go see it. I can only imagine how funny this movie is going to be
i bet this movie gets a lots kids in the theater seat..older peopl have no idea what an Emoji is,,