Emoji are somewhere between 'smilies' and cartoons. Widely used in Japanese mobile messaging, they are colorful and often animated inline graphics - or characters? While there is no move to standardize them and they are not interoperable between carriers, they are currently treated as characters and each carrier has its own, curiously non overlapping section of the private use area for them... This talk will describe how SVG can be used to create such multicolored, animated glyphs, sent along with the content rather than being built in, and either represented as private use characters or as non-Unicode inline glyphs. This approach adds interoperability and richness and decreases the need for standardising these either in Unicode or as a defacto codification of the PUA.