![]() The Emoji Movie presents viewers with a perfect storm of bullet-comment-ready source material. (If you’re not familiar with the culture of bullet commentary, check out this recent explainer by Magpie Digest.) Watching this film on Chinese streaming sites, you get something that anyone watching in US theaters does not: real-time streaming commentary from other people watching the film at the same time. Whenever a new Chinese app made a cameo in the film, the real-time bullet commentary scrolling across the top of the screen would explode with excitement and recognition, which brings me to the next point: 2. They’re all gone in the Chinese version of the film, however - Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (which are all blocked in China, incidentally) are replaced with their Chinese equivalents, a major edit that filters down to the level of the film’s dialogue (“We have to escape to Baidu Netdisk Cloud” is said at one point). In fact, a common thread running through critical hatred of The Emoji Movie was the film’s egregious use of product placement - Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other favorites are featured prominently in the plot of the US cut. ![]() ![]() In one of the many terrible reviews of this film to come out in the US, a critic notes that the only Chinese app to make the cut across the Pacific is WeChat, “the megapopular Chinese app that nobody uses in the United States” (not true). Most of China’s tech biggies are there: Baidu (Baidu Pan, the search giant’s cloud storage app), Tencent (WeChat and Tencent Video), Sina (Weibo), Alibaba (Tmall).Įven some less titanic apps, like selfie-editor Meitu, get a visual shoutout. It’s totally localizedīefore I realized what was going on, I was very confused to see many real Chinese apps represented in the fictional world of The Emoji Movie. The Emoji Movie makes way more sense in China, for four reasons: 1. Presumably most of the people rating The Emoji Movie on Douban saw it on a Chinese streaming site like Tencent Video, and after completing this feat myself, I think I know why. The film’s Douban page lists a 2018 Mainland China release, of which I could find no further evidence online. Over on Douban - a Chinese site with a film branch similar to IMDb - The Emoji Movie has fared a bit better, rocking a 5.2/10 rating, with most votes falling squarely in the middle-of-the-road 3 stars range: Representative critical reviews come with titles like “Do not see The Emoji Movie” ( Vox) and “The Emoji Movie is a shameless, witless piece of poop” ( SCMP). It was an epic box office flop, and currently ranks a 2.9/10 on IMDb and a 9% on Rotten Tomatoes. Miller (aka Silicon Valley’s Erlich Bachman) as a “Meh Emoji” who travels through the apps of his owner’s phone trying to fix a glitch in his program. In case you’re not quite the cineaste I happen to be, some background: The Emoji Movie is a 2017 animated feature produced by Sony, starring T.J. The other night I went to Tencent Video to see what new Hollywood films they’d released, seeking a unique cultural experience, and I found just that: The Emoji Movie. – This article originally appeared on Sixth Tone. Zhang Jianzhong, president of the Beijing Tobacco Control Association, told Beijing Daily his organization even personally contacted Tencent’s CEO, Ma Huateng - also known as Pony Ma - to raise awareness about the message the symbol was sending. ![]() The association, in turn, lobbied the city’s cyberspace authorities to resolve the matter.īoth QQ - another Tencent-owned messaging app - and Weibo removed their tobacco-using emojis in late 2017, but WeChat’s smoking soldier persisted, seemingly undeterred. ![]() According to an article Sunday by state-run newspaper Beijing Daily, anti-smoking campaigners in Beijing first reported “smoking emojis” on social platforms like WeChat, Weibo, and QQ to the city’s tobacco control association in 2017. WeChat has been under pressure to reconsider its tobacco-related messaging for years. The platform declined an interview request Monday, and a source within the company told Sixth Tone that staff had been asked not to discuss the matter with the media. WeChat has been reticent to say more about what prompted the change, which came with the Version 8.0.0 update earlier this year and has since gone largely unnoticed. It’s not hard to spot the difference: In the current version, the helmeted head is missing its trademark cigar.Ī single line of text included with the post reads, “Recently… quit smoking.” In a post Sunday on microblogging platform Weibo, social app WeChat’s parent company Tencent included before-and-after screenshots from the app’s emoji library, circling the “soldier face” emoji decked out in its army-green helmet. China’s most widely used app said Sunday that its cigar-loving soldier had adopted healthier habits.Īn iconic emoji on China’s most widely used social network has given up smoking. ![]()
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