It stars the voices of T.J. Miller, James Corden, Anna Faris, Maya Rudolph, Steven Wright, Jennifer Coolidge, Jake T. Austin, Christina Aguilera, Sofía Vergara, Sean Hayes, and Sir Patrick Stewart.

Inspired by Leondis' love of Toy Story (1995), the film was fast tracked into production in July 2015 after the bidding war and the project was officially announced in April 2016, originally titled EmojiMovie: Express Yourself.

[7] Gene is an emoji that lives in Textopolis, a digital city inside the smartphone of a middle school student, Alex.

Upon receiving a text from his love interest Addie McCallister, Alex decides to send her an emoji.

He is called in by Smiler, a smiley emoji and leader of the text center, who concludes that Gene is a "malfunction" and therefore must be deleted.

Smiler sends more bots to look for Gene when she finds out that he has left Textopolis, as his actions have caused Alex to think that his phone needs to be fixed.

Gene and Hi-5 come to a piracy app where they meet a hacker emoji named Jailbreak, who wants to reach Dropbox so that she can live in the cloud.

After many attempts, the gang gets past it with a password being Addie's name and make it to the cloud, where Jailbreak prepares to reprogram Gene.

In a mid-credits scene, Smiler has been relegated to the "loser lounge" with the other unused and forgotten emojis for her crimes, wearing numerous braces due to her teeth being chipped by the bot, and playing and losing a game of Go Fish.

At the same time, Leondis received a text message with an emoji, which helped him realize that this was the world he wanted to explore.

However, his producer felt that the world inside a phone was much more interesting, which inspired Leondis to create the story of where and how the emojis lived.

[12] Jordan Peele stated that he was initially offered the role of "Poop" (a part that would ultimately go to Patrick Stewart), which he said led to his decision to retire from acting.

[38] That same day, director Tony Leondis and producer Michelle Raimo Kouyate joined Jeremy Burge and Jake T. Austin[39] to ring the closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange[40] and Saks Fifth Avenue hosted a promotional emoji red carpet event[41] at its flagship store to promote branded Emoji Movie merchandise.

[60] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned The Emoji Movie a score of 12 out of 100 based on 26 critics, indicating "overwhelming dislike", becoming the lowest-rated animated film on the site.

[53] David Ehrlich of IndieWire gave the film a D, writing: "Make no mistake, The Emoji Movie is very, very, very bad (we're talking about a hyperactive piece of corporate propaganda in which Spotify saves the world and Sir Patrick Stewart voices a living turd), but real life is just too hard to compete with right now.

"[62] Alonso Duralde of TheWrap was also critical of the film, calling it "a soul-crushing disaster because it lacks humor, wit, ideas, visual style, compelling performances, a point of view or any other distinguishing characteristic that would make it anything but a complete waste of your time".

[63] Owen Gleiberman of Variety lambasted the film as "hectic situational overkill" and "lazy", writing, "[t]here have been worse ideas, but in this case the execution isn't good enough to bring the notion of an emoji movie to funky, surprising life.

"[18] Writing in The Guardian, Charles Bramesco called the film "insidious evil" and wrote that it was little more than an exercise in advertising smartphone downloads to children.

[64] Reviewers like The Washington Post, The Guardian, the Associated Press, The New Republic, the Hindustan Times also cited the film's negative comparisons and similarities to Inside Out (2015), Toy Story (1995), Foodfight!

[a] Nigel Andrews of the Financial Times, however, gave the film 3/5 stars, writing: "Occasionally it's as if The Lego Movie is reaching out a long, friendly arm to Inside Out and falling into the chasm between.

[81] It became the first animated film to win in any of those categories,[82] as well as the third animated film overall to win a Razzie (previously, Kelsey Grammer won the award for Worst Supporting Actor in 2015 for voicing the Tin Man in Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return as well as for his live-action roles in The Expendables 3, Think Like a Man Too, and Transformers: Age of Extinction, while Thumbelina won the since-retired award for Worst Original Song in 1995 for "Marry the Mole").