It seems that everywhere you look these days emotional icons are becoming part of the accepted and widely understood language used by the public. Electronic messages often feature emoji characters in some shape or form either as an addition at the end or often to replace words themselves within the content. Now it seems that the images that commonly say what many people struggle to convey with words alone are to be incorporated into a feature Film.

Sony to make the picture

Sony Pictures Animation have eagerly grabbed the rights to create what they hope will become a film franchise.

Although the situation is slightly different in this circumstance (there were no rights to actually be bought), instead it has become a straight race to see who could produce the feature first, with Sony keen to beat Warner Bros and Paramount to the 'prize'.

Co-writers

The initial project is to have the writing team of Eric Siegel and Tony Leondis behind it. Leondis is set to also direct the picture, having previously worked on several animation projects in the past. He began as a story artist on The Prince of Egypt and The Lion King II: Simba's Pride. Later projects have seen his director instincts take over in such as Igor and Kung Fu Panda: Secrets of the Masters. The characters for the movie are to be developed from Apple's library of symbols.

Emoji origins

The name 'emoji' is a combination of the words 'e' (picture) and 'moji' (character) and a rough translation from its Japanese origins in the late 1990s forms the term "pictograph". The creation of the icons has been attributed to NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese firm specialising in communications, especially mobile phones.

By using the colourful icons in an electronic message, they allow the sender to pass on a thought or emotion in a visual format. They often say that a picture is worth a thousand words and although an emoji is not quite that powerful, it can still form a highly expressive purpose within the writer's toolkit.

Flexibility of emojis

With the usage of emojis branching out into other areas, their flexibility seems to have few boundaries at present.

Only last month it was announced that a firm in the UK was looking to bring in the world's first 'Emoji passcode' using just four emoji characters. The justification for not using traditional PINs or passcodes in Intelligent Environments' Android digital banking app was the wide variety of combinations that emojis made possible. As a consequence the company claim that Security is improved as there are far more possible combinations with 44 emojis to choose from than from using the standard numbers from zero to nine instead.

Fastest-growing language in UK

It is claimed that the usage of emojis in language is growing extremely quickly in the UK. A survey made recently determined that of those people in the age range 18-25 who were asked, a massive 72 per cent found it easier to express their feeling via emojis than they could do with text. Emojis look set to continue their prominence it seems.