Sausage Party
Setyh Rogen, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Kristen Wiig
Directors Conrad Vernon, Greg Tiernan
Review Ray Chan
The movie’s opening barrage of profanity serves as a warning to parents who might have wandered in with their kids on the assumption that this was an innocent little cartoon about the secret lives of groceries. Don’t be fooled by the anthropomorphic edibles, for it’s far from suitable for those of a tender age.
It takes place in a supermarket, where the produce stirs to life every morning by singing a joyous hymn about “The Great Beyond”, dreaming of that transcendent moment when “the gods” will pick them from the shelf, pop them in their trolley and take them out of those elusive sliding doors to some heavenly plane.
For the sausages Frank (Seth Rogen), Carl (Jonah Hill) and Barry (Michael Cera), reaching this nirvana would mean getting the chance to be up close with their ladylike companions: the hotdog buns, the sauciest of which is Brenda (Kristen Wiig).
But when Frank and Brenda are separated from their friends and left behind in the store, they learn they’ve been spared from a viciously violent fate in which their deities brutally slaughter food by boiling them, slicing them and, most heinously of all, chewing them up and swallowing them.
Spurred on by this epiphanous discovery, the newly liberated Frank and Brenda roam the aisles with ideological frenemies Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton by way of Woody Allen) and Lavash (David Krumholtz), who are later joined by sexy Teresa del Taco (Salma Hayek), whose flirtations leave Brenda questioning her devout faith. Adding some spice (pun intended) to the journey, along the way, they’re all pursued by a vengeful feminine hygiene product (Nick Kroll).
Directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan (ironically, of Thomas and Friends fame) totally succeed in making this an effective visual and tonal spoof of animation houses like Pixar and DreamWorks.
With the animation offering the writing squad new ways to be naughty, they take full advantage of it, throwing in boorish bufoonery and sexual innuendo throughout the film, in effect turning it into one whole running gag about intentionally-offensive stereotyping of foreign cuisine and anatomically-accurate representation of foodstuff.
But there’s more to the scripting of Rogen, his regular creative partner Evan Goldberg, Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir, than just the serving of smut – this is not an attempt at producing a lewd lampoon just for the sake of it.
Look deeper and you’ll find wisps of social commentary, from introspections of warring nations to blind devotion to various theological beliefs.
And nothing can really quite prepare you for the virtuoso climax to the grocerial gross-outs: a graphic bacchanal conducted entirely by the contents of a fridge.
Unless you are of a sensitive nature – and if you are, you wouldn’t go to a Seth Rogen movie anyway – you will leave the theatre laughing all the way home, even if you might just contemplate what the popcorn was really thinking.
