Your favorite Disney characters are now emoji

It's been a good week for app-inspired nostalgia. On top of last week's Pokémon craze, Disney also has a new app that will provide some throwback joy.

The company just launched its new emoji app, Disney Emoji Blitz, which brings some of its most-love characters to your keyboard.

Part game part emoji keyboard, the app offers a somewhat different take than the typical emoji keyboard. The keyboard starts out with only a handful of characters, and users earn more by playing the accompanying match-three game.

The game itself is similar to other Disney games: players match sets of three or more of emoji in 60-second rounds, while earning bonuses and racking up points. Points get you in-game coins, which can be redeemed for additional characters for the keyboard portion of the app.

The concept may sound a little gimmicky (and it does include the requisite in-app purchase options as well) but the characters themselves don't feel gimmicky at all.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The characters, which come from old favorites like The Little Mermaid as well as newer titles like Finding Dory, aren't just pulled from the films they come from. Each one was redesigned to take on distinctly emoji-like characteristics, says the app's executive producer Nacia Chambers.

"The team did a lot of research, looking at Unicode emojis," she tells Mashable. "We looked at how all of those known platforms were expressing all of these different expressions and then we went and said 'OK, what's the Disney take on these?' "

Right now the app has characters from 33 different Disney movies and a couple hundred other "object" characters (think, shoes, cars and the other non-smiley face emoji), and Chambers says they plan to continue updating the app with additional characters.

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