From the smartphone to the big screen: In "The Emoji Movie," director Tony Leondis brings viewers to Textopolis, the hometown of all emojis. Every emoji living there has a single expression, except Gene. With Hi-5 and Jailbreak, Gene goes on an adventurous quest in the world of apps to get his code repaired.

Punctuation marks and other characters have long been used as "emoticons" - a combination of the words "emotion" and "icon." The US computer scientist Scott Fahlman is credited with being the first to officially propose on a message board the use of :-) as a smiley emoticon, in 1982. It would take over 30 years for the emoji hype to take off.

In 1999, the Japanese software engineer Shigetaka Kurita developed the world's first 180 emojis (a Japanese term for ideograms). Unlike emoticons, his designs were little images made of encoded pixels. Through universal standards that were developed afterwards, they could quickly be sent to different devices. It was the beginning of a boom.

The inventor of the emoji did not make a fortune out his idea, even though his initial drawings are now exhibited at the MoMA. This German entrepreneur, Marco Hüsges, did. He became the trademark holder of emojis in 2015, and already has over 350 licensees, including major clothing companies. The film studio Sony Pictures also had to obtain a license from him for the new film.

Chinese artist Xu Bing's "Book from the Ground" (2014) is one that can be read by anyone, as it uses only symbols and icons that are universally understood. It depicts 24 hours in a day of a typical urban worker. It appears to have inspired tennis champion Roger Federer. He tweeted what happened during his day off with a series of emojis.

The Unicode Consortium is the body in charge of accepting new emojis. New ones are greenlighted once a year. Anyone can propose a new character; they need to be symbols that can be expected to be used frequently. The four emojis shown above, from Apple, have already been approved and will be released this year.

In 2015, Finland became the first country to release its national emojis. Along with the symbols depicted above, the Finnish symbols include a reindeer, an icebreaker and wool socks. Altogether, 56 images were created to describe the country's culture. One design was rejected by the Unicode Consortium: the Kalsarikännit emoji. The word describes getting drunk at home, alone in your underwear.

Until last year, it was still possible to send a pistol emoji on Apple's iOS. In September 2016, the company replaced the icon with a green water gun. The company has pursued its stance against weapons ever since. However, if you send the squirt gun emoji from an iPhone to an Android user, it will no longer look like a toy, but like a revolver.

In 2015, the Face With Tears of Joy emoji comprised nearly 20 percent of all emoji use in the UK, which is why Oxford Dictionaries picked it as its 2015 Word of the Year, marking a historic moment of recognition of the importance of emojis. Also known as the Crying Laughing emoji, it expresses laughter to the point of tears - but some people provocatively use it in an aggressive, ironic way.

A global celebration of emojis has been held since 2014, on July 17 - the date shown on the calendar emoji. Ahead of this year's Emoji Day, a Guinness World Record was set: the largest gathering of people dressed as emoji faces in multiple venues took place on July 15. Altogether, 531 fans dressed up in emoji costumes in Moscow, Dubai, Dublin, Sao Paulo and London (pictured).