The Emoji Movie

If you don't know what an emoji is forget it. The film will mean nothing to you and the antics of these funny icony things will make zero sense.

For those in the smart phone community who text and email and Facebook all day - tech savvy Millennials, not grown-ups who read newspapers - this will appear app-happy and half way cool.

An emoji is a smiley face that people add to technical communications, except there is so much more choice now. As well as smiley there are a multitude of others, including a slice of pizza, a devil and just about anything you might want in this wordless age.

The Emoji Movie is not The Lego Movie. Even the animation is unadventurous. The plot is baffling, which in itself need not be a problem, although this time it is.

Inside a smart phone is a parallel universe, called Textopolis - no relation to Zootropolis - where these emojis live, entirely at the mercy of the phone's owner, in this case a high school kid with a crush on a girl he is afraid to message. The emojis wait. Will he delete them? Wow, that's not nice. Worse than being trapped in Loser Lounge.

The creators play around with characters, such as Gene who can do multiple expressions which makes him an oddball when he wants to be an inball like his friends Hi-5, a hand with an English accent, and Jailbreak, a princess in disguise. The bad boys are bots and there are obstacles like Firewall and escape routes like Dropbox.

For idiot mobile users this is as much gobbly as it is gook. For the rest it's an interesting idea that exhausts comprehension. The brave new world of electronic dictatorship is not ready for this. There are no maps.

When fecal matter hits the air conditioner there's only one thing to do.

"Find a hacker and get reprogrammed."

Great! How?