Based on the popular ideogram images that have proliferated social media and cellular conversation around the world over the course of the past several years, Sony Pictures Animation is currently hard at work on producing The Emoji Movie - an animated film that takes the popular form of pictographic conversation to previously unexplored territory. Focusing on an alternate universe located in the average smart phone, the new movie will star turns from all-star talents such as Silicon Valley lead actor T.J. Miller, late night talk show host James Corden, and Broad City star Ilana Glazer - provided an impending law suit is successfully avoided.

Directed by Anthony Leondis with an original screenplay co-written by Eric Siegel, The Emoji Movie has already seen the release of its first official image and character details - though many potential viewers are no doubt still waiting for the first batch of footage to be released. As it were, the first teaser trailer has now made its way online.

In the footage featured below, distributor Columbia Pictures teases potential viewers with the kind of humor soon to be featured in The Emoji Movie - which was previously titled Emojimovie: Express Yourself - with a first look at the Meh emoji as voiced by the ever deadpan standup comedian Steven Wright. Whether or not the rest of the movie will live up to the production's outsized ambition remains to be seen.

Emojimovie: Express Yourself characters

Based on everything that's been revealed thus far about the new movie, Leondis and Siegel have their work cut out for them if they hope to make The Emoji Movie into something more substantial than its fairly routine narrative premise. Given the fact that plans with developers for future mobile apps are in the works, it's beginning to look a little uncertain whether or not the feature film in question will be able to sustain a long line of franchise tie-in deals going down the road.

Then again, maybe hardened skeptics and general viewers alike will both be surprised when The Emoji Movie finally sees theatrical release come next August, and the movie will prove to be another modest success story in the same vein as The Angry Birds Movie and Trolls. Either way, Here's to hoping for the very best from Leondis, Siegel, and company when their new movie finally makes its way to theaters across the country and around the world.

The Emoji Movie opens in U.S. theaters on August 4, 2017.

Source: Sony/Columbia Pictures

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