The Emoji Story: You should never have so much fun learning about Unicode

It’s a shame that the 2017 The Emoji movie exists – although by all means get that money, Patrick Stewart (as “Shit”) and Maya Rudolph (“Smiler”). It’s just … this animated cash grab smeared a perfectly good title for a top emoji treatise that wouldn’t follow until two years later: The 2019 Tribeca Film Festival Selected Documentary Image character.

You could (power) recognize this film today as Emoji’s story, since it was acquired by the production company Utopia in December 2020 before seeing its name changed and finally becoming available on most VOD platforms. But this comprehensive look at the world of 1,182 unique (and counted) emoji was first brought to our radar during South by Southwest 2019. Jennifer 8. Lee, emoji activist and dumpling emoji creator (🥟), featured a new “interracial couple” emoji (which she helped bring to life alongside partners at Tinder) and mentioned that she produced an upcoming project. Lee’s panel essentially debunked the invisible process of emoji creation and approval for a small Austin Convention Center conference room, and his film set out to do the same for a much larger audience.

“It’s kind of a maze and takes a long time – usually 18-24 months – from when you have an idea to when it hits your iPhone,” Lee said during this SXSW panel. She would know. In addition to their successful dumpling campaign, Lee is one of the leaders of EmojiNation, a group that set out to diversify emoji after learning firsthand how limited the selection process can be. After all, the emoji that are now plaguing our smart devices and social media feeds are all endorsed by the smaller 12-person selection committee made up of representatives of older techies from large companies (Netflix, Google, Oracle, IBM, Apple, Facebook, Adobe, Microsoft, Shopify) alongside a few unexpected guests (German software company SAP; Chinese telecommunications company Huawei; and the government of Oman). Each organization pays tens of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege of having someone vote yes or no on everything from “mate” (a customary Argentine drink) to “anglefish”. Lee eventually joined the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee (a non-voting role open to anyone with a $ 75 / year Unicode subscription) to better learn the emoji verification process and browse submissions.

“And see [the Unicode committee who approves everything], that sucks, ”Lee recalls at SXSW 2019.“ But they were happy to see me there because random people weren’t showing up at this meeting. I felt like I was showing up in a new church with a lot of older, nice white people.

All of this to say that you can’t ask a more skilled team to put together a definitive emoji movie. And Emoji’s story lives up to its pedigree and more.

It’s a doc, but also an outsider story

Watch enough documentaries, and over time, you can’t help but notice that there is a basic formula: to cover the main features of your subject’s story. Highlight its major annual events. Find a few current (ideally, compelling) participants to follow along their journey, whether it’s a business process, a competition, or a change needed to modernize in this fast-paced field. It’s a framework you can apply to anything from people who deal with nutria regularly to taxidermists.

The world of emoji includes all of these components, but Emoji’s story doesn’t separate these familiar documentary puzzle pieces so rigorously like many smaller films do. Instead, this movie seamlessly weaves together all of this related but separate information, which leads to some pretty cinematic touches. At some point, a linguist might explain the evolution of emoji strings as a way to communicate more specific ideas. But rather than sticking with academics to lean on another esoteric aspect of the emoji-dom, Emoji’s story follows that up with a film production map that communicates the following topic to you in an emoji chain. Small moments and sequences like this show that the team behind this movie doesn’t just think about the subject; they also think about how to engage audiences through cinema.

One of the strengths of the film in this regard is its selection of “today’s participants to follow through a journey”. The film was in production around 2017-2018, and each year Unicode sees hundreds of submissions but limits approval to 60 new additions, max. Emoji’s story recounts three such hopes: a teenage girl hoping to see herself soon in group chats via a hijab emoji; two Argentinian women who are obsessed with the mate and want (digitally) to take it on a global scale; and a UK public health organization looking to create a vintage emoji.

Right from the start, this selection shows the vast array of concepts and possible creators who submit to Unicode each year. Anybody can submit a proposal as long as the idea simply meets a few basic criteria, such as having clear popularity or multiple uses, while not being a specific public figure or brand, and avoiding redundancy with an existing emoji. But as these individuals use their varying degrees of resources and prepare to travel to Palo Alto to make their final launches in person, you can’t help but feel like they’re all underdogs, given the game of. numbers that works against them. In this way, Emoji’s story craves the same kind of propulsive emotional investment you get from a well-executed sports movie (whether it’s Major league or The queen’s gambit); it’s just teaching you something at the same time.

And to be clear, the whole subject is much more fascinating than many people realize. Emoji’s story traces the unorthodox lineage of this modern language, discusses both its unique strengths and limitations, and explores what the future of emoji acceptance can and should be (a post-Unicode society may be coming, everybody). I personally went through a dozen emoji proposals and thought for a long time about the possibility of coming up with a concept worth submitting after seeing Lee’s presentation in 2019, and Emoji’s story only rekindled this dream of rainy days. It will likely have the same effect on many viewers, so it’s great that this film manages to both teach and entertain by subconsciously planting (🧠) the seeds (🌱) of inspiration (💡).

Emoji’s story is available to rent or purchase on most VOD platforms, including Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and Vudu.

Listing Image by The Emoji Story