WeChat emoji being turned into blockbuster movie

Even if you don’t use a messaging app, you’re about to start seeing a lot more of this rabbit. That’s because Tuzki, the expressive little beastie that rocketed to fame as an animated emoji inside China’s WeChat, is being made into a blockbuster cartoon movie.

Tuzki, seen here in the “Office Life” sticker pack, was one of the first animated emojis to be made available for download inside WeChat. Those stickers helped boost the popularity of the mobile-only social network, which now has 800 million active users mainly in China, and created a new trend in messaging that was eventually copied by Facebook Messenger and, more recently, Apple’s iMessage.

The emo rabbit was created by Beijing-based illustrator Momo Wang.

Photo credit: Momo Wang’s Facebook.

The Tuzki movie is being produced by Chinese tech giant Tencent, the company that makes WeChat. The firm announced today that its Tencent Pictures wing, which launched last year, will start work on Tuzki alongside more than 20 other projects. It’ll hit cinemas in 2018.

The studio had a recent hit with the Warcraft movie – even though it was panned by many critics.

Momo at the Tencent Pictures event to announce the Tuzki movie, which is expected to begin production next year and screen in 2018. Photo credit: Momo Wang’s Facebook.

After going viral on WeChat, Tuzki later appeared in a promo for KFC in China, and in 2014 the mischievous floof went global as it starred in stickers on Facebook Messenger.

Tuzki predates China’s smartphone boom, first appearing in old-skool chat apps like MSN and QQ (also a Tencent service) shortly after its creation in 2006. Momo was still a college student when she first penned the character.

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