Emoji Movie Review

The Emoji Movie is a Brilliant Piece of Satire that Exposes the Apartheid Education Destroying America's Public Schools

     On a chilly November day four years ago in the South Bronx, I left the main building of P.S. 65, the elementary school in which I had been teaching 5th graders, to walk two blocks west towards the local movie theater. I had heard that a new movie called The Emoji Movie was to be shown and, not knowing what an "emoji" was, I decided to go and watch. I brought Pineapple along with me, thinking that the experience would be informative for us both.

     The room that we watched the movie in wasn't very big, but it gave off a somewhat cozy feeling. As I looked around, I saw that some of the ceiling tiles had cracked and fallen, and now lay on the ground in pieces. I heard the quiet hum of an air conditioner above me, but couldn't feel much of a temperature difference compared to outside the theater. The fabric of the seats had holes and tears from decades of use, and the stuffing could be seen spilling out of the sides. 94 percent of the people sitting in the room were black, 5 percent were Hispanic, and 1 percent was pineapple.

     As the lights in the room dimmed, the usual mummers of "why is that guy counting the number of black people in the room?" and "why is he just holding a pineapple?" slowly died down, and the large screen in the front lit up. What followed was the most incredible, witty, and moving satire I had ever seen. The movie's unwavering devotion to addressing the issue of apartheid education is astounding. The movie's main character, Alex, is a black boy who experiences first hand the harms of the rote-and-drill education system at his school. The emojis, a smart and hilarious little bunch of creatures that live inside the cellular telephones, also experience a similar treatment by the leaders of the telephone. Alex, acting as the ingenue, unknowingly reveals the idiocy of the current urban public education system and suggests several ingenious new ideas for integration. The emojis, intentionally depicted as Asian rather than white, undergo a very tongue-in-cheek Civil Rights Movement of their own from within the telephone. Watching the scene where Alex turns himself into an emoji to save his love interest, the pineapple emoji, from the wrath of the vengeful kitchen knife emoji, I couldn't help but appreciate this burlesque parody of the influences of capitalism and the sugar industry on students in urban public schools. 

I give The Emoji Movie a 💯/100. For the sake of Alex, Pineapple, and all of the students in urban American public schools today, I certainly hope this kind of Juvenalian Satire continues to be made.