The Emoji Movie review – zestless, pointless boilerplate animation

While the Angry Birds movie balanced dumbed-down world with a smart script, this personification of smartphone symbols is just 'meh'

One thing no one needed this summer was a very rubbish version of Inside Out, that animated gem about the personified emotions inside the surreal landscape of a young girl's mind. Here, instead of a mind, a smartphone, and instead of emotions, emojis: all the wacky little symbols that originated in Japan, not that you'd know that from this film.

The Emoji Movie could in theory have been witty and sophisticated, like The Lego Movie - or even the Angry Birds movie - juxtaposing its apparently dumbed-down world with a smart script. But no. This is just a boilerplate animation, zestless, pointless. The idea is that the "Meh" emoji wants to express something more complicated, in effect to be something other than its assigned identity, and here I am prepared to concede that The Emoji Movie does in its way confront an existential problem that Inside Out arguably never solved.