They’re making an emoji film. After what was apparently quite the bidding war, Sony have managed to buy the rights to make our little moon-faced friends into feature length big screen fun. This fills me with terror and I anticipate being very angry. If this goes anything like when DreamWorks reanimated Postman Pat and stuck him in a reimagined version of The X Factor I will be forced to send a strongly worded letter. What if they get the voice of the sassy lady emoji totally wrong or actually make her work in customer service as nature/Unicode intended? STOP DESECRATING THE THINGS I LOVE.
I will strongly defend emojis from these clever types who try and tell us that they are making us dumber and taking away our ability to use words properly. It’s widely accepted that anywhere up to 93% of our communication is non-verbal and made up of other stuff like body language and tone of voice. (The famous - and widely contested - 93% figure was stuck together by a dude called Dr. Mehrabian in the 1970s if you’re interested – but that’s really a different conversation.) Considering that more and more of our communication takes the form of iMessages and Whatsapps; where does that leave us?
I don’t really speak to anyone on the phone outside of work except my mum and a plethora of call centre workers offering me something about PPI insurance for that fictional loan their records indicate I’ve taken out. To my, admittedly biased, mind this means that emojis are really useful in helping us to communicate. When I know you’ve been up to no good on a Friday night I’m not going to write you an essay on the movement of my eyebrows I’m going to send you this face:
And you will know what I mean.
For the purposes of non-verbal communication, the little smiley face is your little smiley face and if you’re telling me that your facial expressions are making you less able to communicate then I really can’t help you can I, smartypants?
In fairness, I suppose this argument doesn’t quite apply in the same way to the faceless emojis… But somehow I think sending someone a baffling string of a balloon a ghost and a poo with a face is pretty equivocal to sitting in the corner waving your arms going dfkjherkjfbnwk when you’ve just got an email that makes your brain melt. I get you, man.
What is frustrating is when you just can’t find quite the right emoji for what you want to convey. For example I am constantly in need of a crossed fingers emoji. Also cheese. I think this is why there are such flurries of genuine excitement when they announce everyone’s favourite: NEW EMOJIS. I find it hard to keep up with what are the real new ones and which are cruel, tantalising, internet pranks. The online rumour mill has dangled a cheese emoji under my nose as well as other treats such as bacon and avocado. I think the Unicode consortium (who I always imagine sitting around a round table wearing cloaks a la Star Wars - or more realistically Hot Fuzz) need to get a move on for some of these – if we don’t get an avocado emoji before 2016 then it'll be too late - waxing lyrical about the avocado you ate at brunch is already about as original as saying the poo with a face is your favourite emoji. Incidentally, here are some of my favourite emojis...
So back to the film – I think we are in seriously dangerous territory here. Like, red alert, ‘flashing siren emoji’ danger. If emojis go down the road of Postman Pat, Fireman Sam and other beloved children’s characters, ruthlessly modernised in the name of 'entertainment', I just don’t think they’re going to be good anymore. Not just because they’re not cool but because they will inspire a kind of strange nostalgia for the carefree days we spent flamenco lady-ing through our youth. Sony Pictures if you are reading this, I beg of you; be careful with my friends.
Like this? Then you might also be interested in:
Avocado! Face Palm! Here Are The New Emojis Coming Next Year
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Photographed by Matilda Hill-Jenkins
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.