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| i saved this fuckin fossil to my hard drive in 2010 |
Sony is set to release next year a movie about a common set of images that depict a single, legible emotion set on a nonspecific shape. Which is funny, because I thought the Minions movie already came out in 2015.
The minions movie/market phenomenon was/is such a blatantly corporate money grab that it’s almost too easy to make fun of. I don’t even know what the movie is about; I’ve never even seen the trailer. But what’s really interesting is how indistinguishable minions are. They’re nothing like, say, Star Wars Merchandise, where the characters are easily distinguishable and the narrative firmly set. Minions, as far as I can tell, are differentiated by slightly different proportions and goggle styles. Beyond that, they’re just a vehicle for the expression of funny faces.
So they’re animated emojis, basically. An emoji is a particle of expression, conveying an easily legible emotion. They’re a feature of the blending that happens online between the image and the word, two modes of visual communication that have spent a long time apart. It’s not a totally unprecedented blend: comics, illustrations, illuminated manuscripts, and plenty of other forms have used the potent combination to good effect. But like many other forms of communication in this, the age of aquarius, it has become astonishingly easy. Memes are the most obvious forms but it carries throughout the web—I’ve found that instagram posts do better with cutesy captions than without text; I’ve been starting these blog posts with a picture for the same reason; and crucially our textual discourse is now filled with emojis.
The emoji represents an interesting kind of blend between text and image, very different from (but still related to) the common meme of text-over-image. Here it is an image with an almost (but not quite) textual containment of meaning. A word has a discrete referent; an emoji expresses a discrete emotion. This fixedness actually seems to be a plot point in the upcoming movie—the protagonist is an emoji who is not fixed on any one emotional display. Charming.
Now that our emotions have such easy signifiers available corporations are circling like sharks with the scent of blood. After movies, who knows what they’ll get into. But if there’s one thing that’s wonderful about the internet, its the ease with which corporate signifiers can be recognized, repurposed, or abandoned by real humans just trying to talk to each other. Anyways, here’s my favorite work of art from 2015: a minion committing seppuku.
