Before I start, I'd like to say how sorry I am for letting myself get angry in the previous installment. The intro just rubs me the wrong way, but I...
I better proceed with a less... emotional viewpoint. Or should I say, less emoji-onal. Heh heh.
I found the senior citizen emoticon and "ow my colon" jokes amusing, but I did not laugh.
Other than that, the "my eyes are up here" joke made me felt quite ambivalent and I tire of seeing the "elephant and wind" joke.
Gene seems very excitable, which gets him a lot of flak with the rest of the emoji. Even the laugh-cry emoji calls him a freak for laughing. That made me slightly upset, but oh well.
Gene's parents then ask him if he was laughing, and when it was revealed that he was, they keep him in the bathroom because they feel he wasn't ready to work in the phone. Mel thinks he has the wrong reaction (exemplified when he gets a dizzy expression when Poop Emoji Jr. accidentally hits him with a stall door.) However, he wants to prove that he can be a functional member of Textopolis society despite his... differences. He says he never fits in, but wants to change it by working like other emoji.
See, this reminds me of how people with disabilities and other perceived "differences" get discriminated (maybe by even their own family members), and how they want to prove to others that they aren't "defective". Of course, calling this tripe a metaphor for disability is an insult, and I've seen better metaphors in Finding Dory.
Gene enters his workplace, and meets Smiler (all while trying and failing to be a Meh). She was an obvious Stepford Smiler, and if the trailers hadn't spoiled her villainy, I would have guessed for myself that she wasn't one of the good guys.
We see Hi-Five getting rejected from the "popular emoji" club (presumably because Alex has ceased to use him as often as he used to.) He tries to emulate Fistbump, but fails and bumps into Gene. Gene helps him up, and Hi-Five tells him to create a diversion while he sneaks into the club before Smiler appears and asks him what he was doing there. He told her he got lost and returns to his cube while grumbling.
Gene walks into his cube, and gets so excited about it while Poop Emoji Sr. looks at him in exasperation. The movie then cuts to a scene when Alex's teacher explains about hieroglyphics. He explains that hieroglyphics are a language of pictures. This creates a parallel to the emojis, as they are also a language of pictures, but unfortunately it was rather weak as there was no other scene complementing or at least highlighting this parallel.
Addy McCallister sends Alex a text while the class ensues, and Alex asks his friend what to send. He tells her not to type anything back and just send her an emoji. While Alex decides which emoji he should send, all emoji wait in anticipation and the controllers of the large finger-scanner thing tells certain emoji to stand by.
Then Meh gets picked.
Gene, upon getting picked, tries to calm himself down but ends up freaking out instead. The controllers panic as well and try to stop the scanner, but to no avail. A weird-looking emoji gets sent to Addy, which freaks everyone out.
Which begs the question: won't it help if Alex looks at the emoji he wants to send before sending it? Yes, wrong emojis do get sent by accident sometimes, but looking at the emoji before sending it right away will help prevent such an embarrassing occasion. And even if he sends the wrong emoji, can't he just clarify or apologize to Addy? A "sorry, wrong emoji" would suffice. It's not exactly fair for him to only send emoji when Addy sends him text and actual content. I get that he's shy, but as I said, you can't rely too much on emoji when you text message.
Anyway, Gene feels the need to get out of his cube, but he can't, so out of desperation he clings to the finger-scanner. His weight destabilizes the scanner and causes it to destroy a great amount of cubes.
Smiler then shows up and tells Gene that he's a malfunction. She refuses to give Gene another chance but instead holds a board meeting to decide what the other emoji will do to him.
Later at night, all the emoji discuss the incident and Gene's malfunction. Gene sits on the roof of the office building and looks over Textopolis. His parents come and tells him that even though he is a malfunction, they will still love him. However, they want him to be locked up in the apartment until everything blows over. Angered by this and not wanting to run away from his problems, he goes down the elevator.
- Gene: Wait, you want to hide me away? You're embarrassed by me.Gene's parents: It's for your own safety. / We're trying to protect you, son.
Again, had this been a better movie, this could highlight the mistreatment of disabled individuals by their own parents, particularly how they are forced to stay home and do nothing if they were considered "low-functioning". Unfortunately it isn't.
And so goes the first 20 and a half minutes of the movie. Good day.
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