The Windows command prompt has a lot of limitations with regards to Unicode characters, especially those outside the basic multilingual plane(BMP, or U+0000 to U+FFFF). The command prompt defaults to a legacy OEM encoding (cp437 on US Windows) and has limited font support for characters outside the localized encoding. Find a Python IDE that has good support for UTF-8.

One quick-and-dirty way to see a wide variety of Unicode characters is to write to a file and leverage the browser:

import os
with open('test.htm','w',encoding='utf-8-sig') as f:
    f.write('\U0001f44d')
os.startfile('test.htm')

This displays in the latest Chrome browser on my Windows 10 system.

It's a new feature in Windows 10. You can access the emoji keyboard shortcut using the keys: "Windows key + ." or, "Windows key + >"

The "." is the period or, the full stop key, not the point or the decimal key.

The issue is not with cmd.exe, which just outputs byte strings to the terminal it is running in using whatever encoding is being used.

So, if you run Python in Command Prompt, and get it to print("\U0001F600"), that character will be sent to the terminal.

However, the default Windows Console Host that used to be what you always opened when you ran Command Prompt on previous versions of Windows, does not support UTF-8 characters by default, it uses another encoding. So, you'll end up seeing this:

However, on Windows 11 the new Windows Terminal is the default, and it does have full support and uses UTF-8 by default. If you run Command Prompt using the Windows terminal, you get this:

It's easy to confuse the command interpreter (the actual CLI application) and the terminal it is running in to show what is going on with the input and output streams for the command interpreter.

PowerShell and Command Prompt are command interpreters. Windows Console Host and Windows Terminal are terminals. It's the choice of the latter that limits what can be rendered. The former both support many encodings.

Note that you can also download and install Windows Terminal on Windows 10 - it's just not the default.

Note: you asked if there's anything you can do. You can and this question goes into that, but also note that this is not recommended and has far-reaching impact on other applications. You definitely wouldn't want to force other users of your Python script to have to do the same. Windows Terminal is here to stay, so using it as the new default is the better option.