Since the moment they were announced at Apple’s iPhone X event, my reaction to animoji has been the same as Sideshow Bob’s reaction to rakes. It’s probably a sign of my advancing age that I don’t find animated avatars — no matter how precisely they map to a person’s facial expressions — all that exciting or thrilling. I’m the guy that gets jazzed about bigger batteries, more storage, and better cameras. The hard and universally tangible things. Not the frivolous and cutesy animal avatars that Apple is dressing up as animoji.

Or so I thought.

Then a colleague showed me the animoji message that his daughter had recorded, and it suddenly dawned on me. Animoji could be exactly the tool we need to start doing video messages as often as we do…

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