Latest news with #TheEmojiMovie
AU Financial Review
28-07-2025
- Entertainment
- AU Financial Review
Are emojis killing written language?
Iwas shocked and dismayed to realise, a few years ago, that I was going to have to watch The Emoji Movie , which was made in 2017 by a mobile phone company, Sony, to promote the use of mobile phones by children. To my great regret, I allowed the film – comfortably among the worst pieces of entertainment ever made – to play in its entirety. I wish I had done something more rational, and enjoyable, such as beating myself unconscious with a frozen haddock. I do not think it is unreasonable to describe The Emoji Movie as an act of cultural terrorism, an attempt to spread hopelessness and anhedonia among all the people on whom it was inflicted. The people who made the film were clearly recruited to do so by a foreign power (America) with the intention of eroding other cultures, making us doubt the value of art itself. Anyone involved in the making of it is pure evil, and in a just, well-run world they would never work again. New Statesman
AU Financial Review
28-07-2025
- Entertainment
- AU Financial Review
Are emojis killing language?
Iwas shocked and dismayed to realise, a few years ago, that I was going to have to watch The Emoji Movie, which was made in 2017 by a mobile phone company, Sony, to promote the use of mobile phones by children. To my great regret, I allowed the film – comfortably among the worst pieces of entertainment ever made – to play in its entirety. I wish I had done something more rational, and enjoyable, such as beating myself unconscious with a frozen haddock. I do not think it is unreasonable to describe The Emoji Movie as an act of cultural terrorism, an attempt to spread hopelessness and anhedonia among all the people on whom it was inflicted. The people who made the film were clearly recruited to do so by a foreign power (America) with the intention of eroding other cultures, making us doubt the value of art itself. Anyone involved in the making of it is pure evil, and in a just, well-run world they would never work again.
New Statesman
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Are emojis killing language?
Illustration by George Wylesol I was shocked and dismayed to realise, a few years ago, that I was going to have to watch The Emoji Movie, which was made in 2017 by a mobile phone company, Sony, to promote the use of mobile phones by children. To my great regret, I allowed the film – comfortably among the worst pieces of entertainment ever made – to play in its entirety. I wish I had done something more rational, and enjoyable, such as beating myself unconscious with a frozen haddock. I do not think it is unreasonable to describe The Emoji Movie as an act of cultural terrorism, an attempt to spread hopelessness and anhedonia among all the people on whom it was inflicted. The people who made the film were clearly recruited to do so by a foreign power (America) with the intention of eroding other cultures, making us doubt the value of art itself. Anyone involved in the making of it is pure evil, and in a just, well-run world they would never work again. The same is not true of Face with Tears of Joy, Keith Houston's story of the rise of the emoji. (The title refers to the crying-laughing emoji, which is used more than any other.) It is an intelligent, historical account of a cultural phenomenon. But, like the grotesque crime that is The Emoji Movie, it raises questions: for whom do the emoji work? What power do they hold? In 2016, Tom Wolfe published his last book, The Kingdom of Speech. It tells of the search among scientists for an understanding of language, from the point at which Alfred Russel Wallace described it – and the abstract thought it makes possible – as the basis for man's ascent from the state of nature. 'Speech', Wolfe writes, was 'the primal artifact. Without speech the human beast couldn't have created any other artifacts, not the crudest club or the simplest hoe, not the wheel or the Atlas rocket.' It is the basis for mathematics – try counting to ten without using words, Wolfe writes – and trade, farming, science, society, religion. Most of all, it is the basis of the self. As Wittgenstein pointed out, when we think in words – when we think to ourselves I'd like a strawberry, or Martin doesn't look happy, or what is this bloke going on about – these words aren't accompanied by separate thoughts, holding the meanings the words refer to. The words are the thoughts. 'Language itself', as Wittgenstein put it, 'is the vehicle of thought'. People do not think in emoji. I disagree with Houston's description of emoji as 'the world's newest language'. They are not language at all. The emoji set is a collection of phatic expressions which can be used to convey social context and emotion, like the mooing of cows. But they do not have any real semantic significance. They are just pictures of things. They do not combine into greater context. Sometimes – the peach, the aubergine – they can mean two things, but in general they mean what they mean. Compare them, as Houston does, to the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt – weren't they just pictures, too? No. Hieroglyphs were an alphabet of sounds and meanings that could be mixed to create far more complex structures of thought. A picture of an eye did not just mean 'eye'; it meant a sound, a component of meaning, a signifier of cultural significance, heavy with the weight of all the things it had meant over the centuries. It could invoke the gods Ra and Horus. It was capable of being ordered into a practically endless branching complexity of thought. The same cannot be said of a little picture of a smiling cartoon turd. And yet the emoji are in constant use, billions of them teeming through the air, a river of thumbs and smiles and hearts and fruit. What for? And what is that doing to us? In the mid 1990s, Keiichi Enoki, a manager at the Japanese telephone company DoCoMo noticed how easily and capably his young children played with a pager. Pagers were very popular in Japan, and a kind of slang that used numbers as shorthand for words had evolved; three nines, when read out in Japanese – san kyu – sounded a bit like the English 'thank you', for example. DoCoMo had previously failed to understand the potential this represented, but what Keiichi understood from watching his children play with technology was you could not be too patronising, too infantilising. Keiichi incorporated a set of icons – pictograms saved as text, rather than images – into his i-mode web browser, making it simple and kawaii (cute). The effect was transformative; i-mode had a million subscribers within six months. Keitai phones – equipped with basic internet service – spread across Japan. When the iPhone was released in 2007 the then-CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, laughed. 'It doesn't have a keyboard,' he chuckled. Who would pay for that? Ballmer had failed to see what Keiichi had seen, which was that people liked simpler interfaces. The iPhone was a design that could be understood immediately by a young child. There was only one button you could press. This logic would be extended to the iPad, a laptop screen on which it was impractical to type. The apps were little cartoon versions of things – an envelope, a calendar – and from 2010, when emoji were added to Unicode, messages could be composed without even using words. The rising use of emoji combined with the widespread use of other means of phatic communication – the poke, the like, the retweet – allowed people to communicate emotion, mass approval or disapproval, in ever greater volumes, without actually saying anything. In 2014, a new social network was launched called Yo. Users could only send each other a single word: 'yo'. It was meant as a joke – it opened on 1 April – but tens of thousands of people joined and the developers raised millions of dollars before it folded. In 2018, BuzzFeed News asked its readers to respond to questions about that year's midterm elections using emojis. People who worried about gun violence and the climate crisis registered their political sentiment by submitting little pictures of frowny faces, water pistols and rainbow flags. Karl Marx wrote that technology changes how people interact with the world and each other, and emoji are part of the story of a world that is becoming less literate. They represent language that can be more fun, but which is also, by accident or by design, trimmed of its semantic content, made phatic. And perhaps made less powerful and more easily directed too. Some of us may read a warning in Louis MacNeice's strange, prophetic little poem, 'To Posterity' (1957), in which he imagined a time when: 'reading and even speaking have been replaced/By other, less difficult, media', and wonders 'if you/Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste/They held for us for whom they were framed in words.' To be fair, The Emoji Movie may not really have been the act of a deranged cabal of art criminals bent on destroying our culture. But emoji themselves may represent something darker: a shift to communicating without context, to being reduced to simpler and more emotional responses. Every day, more and more people allow chatbots to intercede in their word-making, and it is not hard to imagine a time when the companies who run these machines have a far greater command of human speech, emotion and behaviour. They will run the world then, and all we'll be able to say about it is: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji Keith Houston WW Norton, 224pp, £14.99 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: On freedom vs motherhood] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related This article appears in the 23 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Kemi Isn't Working
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Seth Meyers Thinks Donald Trump's 'Creepy' Cabinet Meeting Screams 1 Thing
Seth Meyers tore into President Donald Trump on Thursday night, mocking what he described as a cringeworthy display of sycophancy from Trump's Cabinet amid ongoing economic uncertainty caused by his tariffs policy. Trump, who paused sweeping tariffs earlier this week after spooking markets, 'seemed to need a self-esteem boost,' the 'Late Night' host joked. So, the president gathered his top officials for what Meyers called 'a ritualistic puckering of the lips and kissing of the buttocks.' The over-the-top praise from Cabinet members, Meyers said, wasn't good. 'When your staff goes that over the top with praise, that's how you know you fucked up,' he said. 'I mean, they're clearly overcompensating. They sound like Hollywood agents after a giant flop — 'You crushed it. You killed it. Don't listen to the critics. 'The Emoji Movie' was art.'' Meyers suggested even Trump appeared visibly uncomfortable during the meeting: 'At some point, I have to believe even he is going to listen to all this slobbering and say, 'Is this gross? Does anyone else feel like this is getting creepy and weird?'' Watch here: Trump's 'F**king Gross' Cabinet Meeting Has Critics Cringing So Hard Stephen Miller's 'Extremely Stupid' Spin On Trump's Tariff Moves Gets Roasted Online Award-Winning Comedian Scraps U.S. Trip Following Warning About Her Trump Jokes
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Heart Eyes' Review: Josh Ruben's Rom-Com Slasher Is the Best Emoji Movie Ever
Well, shut my mouth. Just a few hours — I repeat, hours — after writing that Hollywood never releases a classic romantic movie on Valentine's Day, I see a film that proves me wrong. It just happens to also be an ultraviolent slasher. Touché, Hollywood. You win this round. Then again with a film as good as Josh Ruben's 'Heart Eyes,' everyone's a winner. Ruben is the director of the brilliant 2021 horror comedy Werewolves Within, hands down the best movie ever adapted from a video game. It comes as no surprise that his follow-up would do the same thing for another underwhelming subgenre. 'Heart Eyes' raises the bar for emoji movies, which sounds like faint praise since 'The Emoji Movie' forgot to install a bar, but it's still true. For the last two years a serial killer in a mask that looks like the 'heart eyes' emoji has gone on a Valentine's Day killing spree, brutally slaughtering adorable couples across the country. This year, Heart Eyes has set their sights on Seattle, where an adorably clumsy advertising executive named Ally (Olivia Holt, 'Totally Killer') has just met cute with her hunky and emotionally available new workplace rival, Jay (Mason Gooding, 'Scream VI'). Ally is still getting over her ex-boyfriend and has a randy comic relief best friend, Monica (Gigi Zumbado), who takes her for old-fashioned shopping montages to cheer her up. Oh, but Ally and Jay have the world's worst first date, culminating in the sudden appearance of her ex. To make him jealous she kisses Jay, who kisses her back, which attracts the attention of Heart Eyes, who proceeds to chase them across the city and try to kill them in romantic locales like a botanical garden, a merry-go-round, and a drive-in movie theater playing 'His Girl Friday.' Fans of Ruben's earlier work know two things: He loves horror movies, and he loves love. 'Werewolves Within' and 'Heart Eyes' are both horror movies that interrupt a heartwarming love story, where the leads absolutely have to end up together or I swear to god I will scream. Some genre mash-ups fall into the trap of favoring one genre more than the other, sometimes a lot more, but 'Heart Eyes' is an engrossing and genuinely funny romantic comedy with and without all the murders. That it's a formulaic rom-com is all part of the charm. Romantic comedies, just like slashers, are in the business of giving the audience exactly the same thing, over and over again, but different. The screenplay for 'Heart Eyes' — credited to Phillip Murphy, Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy — adheres to the conventions of the rom-com genre in every conceivable way, but it knows what makes those tropes popular and how to make them sing. If you go to 'Heart Eyes' hoping for a good old-fashioned rom-com, you'll get one. With a scene where someone's face gets viscerally squished by a machine press. If you go to 'Heart Eyes' hoping for a good old-fashioned slasher, you'll mostly get that too. The formulas don't match up perfectly, and 'Heart Eyes' largely skips the part where the killer usually slaughters their way through the supporting cast for two whole acts, until the actual heroes figure out what kind of movie they're in. But in a rom-com the heroes/love interests are always our anchor, so once Heart Eyes starts to attack Ally and Jay, it's like the film moves straight to the pulse-pounding climax, then backtracks a bit and ramps back up again. And then one more time for good measure. Of course no slasher movie is complete without memorable murders, and 'Heart Eyes' murders many, memorably. And yet Ruben miraculously manages to take those brutal slayings and make them feel part-and-parcel with the film's otherwise heightened, chintzy comedy vibe. It's truly gross to watch someone stabbed through the mouth with a tire-iron. It's somehow cute to watch two mismatched rom-com leads bicker about removing it, all while the corpse's wide-open maw and dead, piercing eyes take up the whole silver screen. Priorities, people! Priorities! Speaking of priorities: 'Heart Eyes' co-stars Devon Sawa and Jordana Brewster as Detectives Hobbs and Shaw, and yes, they make that joke, and yes, Jordana Brewster is in the 'Fast and Furious' movies. So according to the 'Last Action Hero' rules, this means in the 'Heart Eyes' universe somebody else plays Vin Diesel's sister in that franchise. It was probably another 'As the World Turns' alumni. Presumably Emmy Rossum. But maybe no one cares about that but me. Anyway, I digress. 'Heart Eyes' seems destined to become a Valentine's Day favorite, that rare horror movie with a great and charming love story, and that even rarer romantic comedy with a great and savage serial killer. So once again, I admit it. I was wrong. Sometimes Hollywood does release a classic Valentine's Day movie in February. Just not usually. The post 'Heart Eyes' Review: Josh Ruben's Rom-Com Slasher Is the Best Emoji Movie Ever appeared first on TheWrap.
