Sausage Party (2016)
Directed by Greg Tiernan
Hot dog Frank leads a group of supermarket products on a quest to discover the truth about their existence and what really happens when they're chosen to leave the grocery store.
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What critics say influenced Sausage Party
There have been very adult-oriented animated movies before; you only have to recall Ralph Bakshi’s “Fritz the Cat,” the X-rated 1972 picture based on Robert Crumb’s comic, which became a huge hit and inspired others of its kind (including a sequel).
Now that that’s behind us, here’s a more in-depth look at the most adult animated film to come along since the 1972 release “Fritz the Cat.”
Welcome to the “Sausage Party,” the most profane animated film since “Fritz the Cat,” the perverse product of that vanguard of vulgarity, Seth Rogen and his Lewd Crew of (mostly) Jews..
Such animated outrage isn't new; Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat broke the old X rating (now NC-17) barrier way back in 1972.
That's where Rogen and Goldberg's Sausage Party transcends other R-rated animated provocations (Fritz the Cat, Heavy Metal) to become something more.
Fritz the Cat was rated X. Sausage Party garnered an R. But, hey, we're talking apples and oranges.
What if the premise of a film like Toy Story, in which inanimate objects come to terms with the meaning of their existence, was pushed to its logical, dark-as-hell conclusion?
In the grand tradition of "Toy Story," ''Sausage Party" imagines the lives of the foodstuffs in the local supermarket aisle.
Animated movies have a long history of anthropomorphizing inanimate objects (toys in Toy Story, automobiles in Cars, plastic building bricks in The LEGO Movie , etc.).
Because, legitimately, Sausage Party is part Toy Story, part The Lego Movie, part Team America, and part Book Of Mormon, all with the sheen and vigor of Chuck Jones animation, but which, despite its influences, is still very much it's own glorious monstrosity.
It’s hard to shake the feeling that story masterminds Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and Jonah Hill would have been better served by a more free-form narrative, something closer to “A Scanner Darkly” than “A Bug’s Life,” but “Sausage Party” was surely hard enough to get financed as it is.
Taken from a Pixar plot perspective, this movie about self-aware food in a supermarket mashes the existential queries of “Toy Story” with the stand-your-ground pride of “A Bug’s Life.”
Frank’s personal awakening begins during this tragedy, a standout sequence that turns a cleanup in the aisles into a Saving Private Ryan-esque warzone nightmare.
If you wanted to see Saving Private Ryan reenacted in a supermarket, this is the movie for you.
Sure, there’s wit here—some fantastically bad puns, an excellent Saving Private Ryan-inspired sequence, etc.—but most of the humor relies on food items saying basically any obscene phrases you can think of.
The horrors of a “cleanup on aisle three” become a scene out of “Saving Private Ryan,” the sage stoners among the Non Perishables include Fire Water (Bill Hader), “They call me MR.
(Directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan do a masterful job spoofing the D-Day sequence in “Saving Private Ryan.”)
However, an early grocery-cart accident parodying “Saving Private Ryan” — while a fairly tired concept to still pull from — becomes a comic highlight thanks to pitch-perfect execution by directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan.
For those too young to remember the output of Ralph Bakshi, the definitive sequence involving animated intercourse would inarguably be the puppet-sex segment in 2004's Team America: World Police.
The precedent for this raunchy animated tale is “Team America: World Police,” which, with its puppet imagery, looked like a children’s movie, but sure didn’t walk or talk like one.
Except that this is a super-duper-R-rated comedy with ripping, raw language, violence against food, and sexual content that makes the puppet liaisons in “Team America: World Police” look downright subtle.
If the movie weren’t quite so pleased with its own raunchiness and political incorrectness (most food items correspond with a cultural stereotype), it might have been less of an extended stunt and more of an ingenious satire along the lines of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut or Team America: World Police.
Unsurprisingly, such hearty notions aren’t sustainable by this doggedly thin lark, which only manages to generate genuine witty momentum during its climax—a sexual romp of wild inappropriateness to rival Team America: World Police’s notorious puppet-sex sequence, and apt to make even the merry orgy revelers of Caligula blush.
At its best, the movie offers in-your-face raunch in the spirit of the superior “Team America: World Police” and “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.”
The obvious bar that the filmmakers reach for is “South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut,” still the high-water mark in adult-geared animation, which blended political commentary with wall-to-wall humor.
But as with 1999’s deceptively deep South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut and, more recently, The Lego Movie, the script works hard to invest its scenario with an existential and political dimension, crudely but effectively expressed.
At its best, the movie offers in-your-face raunch in the spirit of the superior “Team America: World Police” and “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.”
Like "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut" (the best R-rated cartoon ever made, by the way), "Sausage Party" is notable for being more thoughtful than you'd expect and filthier than you ever imagined possible.
This is a movie so ugly it makes “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut” look like one of Studio Ghibli’s exquisitely drawn masterpieces by comparison.
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Like most of the voluminous comedy output from Rogen and his producing and writing partner Evan Goldberg (whose collaborations include the “Neighbors” movies, “This Is the End” and “Superbad” ), “Sausage Party” has a stoned or unhinged quality that makes it seem less like a calculated commodity and more like the results of a late-night dare.
Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen – the guys behind Superbad, Pineapple Express, This Is the End – are the reprobates responsible for Sausage Party and it’s fair to say if you like their previous work, you’ll love this.
As with Rogen and Golberg's previous comedies — including "Superbad," "This is the End" and "Pineapple Express" — "Sausage Party" fills its basket with every food pun, sight gag and sexual innuendo you can imagine and a few overt sex jokes you won't be able to unsee.
Like “This Is the End,” Mr. Goldberg and Mr. Rogen’s 2013 apocalypse comedy, it embraces the darkness of its premise and answers despair with bursts of nasty, knowing silliness.
With a story idea credited to Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, longtime screenwriting and producing partners, and Jonah Hill, who broke out in their autobiographical 2007 film Superbad, and a script by Rogen, Goldberg, and The Night Before co-screenwriters Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir, Sausage Party falls in line with other Rogen-fronted comedies like This Is the End, The Interview, and Neighbors: an inspired premise, spottily funny execution, and eye-rolling gender and cultural stereotypes windmilling at subversiveness.
"This is the End," another Rogen/Goldberg comedy featuring (like this one) the talents of Jonah Hill, James Franco, Michael Cera and others, was notably thoughtful about those questions too.
The now infamous vegetable and sausage massacre (seen in the trailer) is reminiscent of everything from Hostel to Scream via the notorious Italian cannibal film’s of the ’70s, while an outrageous orgy (yes, you read that right!) is as gross as the climax of cult horror movie Society.
The scene plays out like an alternate version of Eli Roth’s “Hostel” only starring food.
Every ethnic group is targeted, and while it’s not mean-spirited, it’s certainly tedious, reinforcing all of the same old, tired racism that’s best left to repeat viewings of “Blazing Saddles.”
But here’s the thing: people would shit themselves if Blazing Saddles came out today.
Is it fair to call a cartoon about a talking hot dog the new 'Blazing Saddles'?
When Mel Brooks directed Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles, part of why they work so well is because they adhere so closely to the reality of the thing they’re parodying.
This pro-intellectualism, anti-religious bent is neither particularly inspired (it was done a decade ago by “Mad Max” filmmaker George Miller in animated kids movie “Happy Feet”) nor compatible with an otherwise sophomoric screenplay.
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Homage to westerns, Oliver Stone acid trips in The Doors, 2D classic Disney animation flashbacks via an 80s slasher movie, Stargate and Saving Private Ryan (particularly) had me absolutely cackling.
His African-American buddy, Grits (Craig Robinson), can’t wait to get high, but lands a great “In the Heat of the Night” reference: “They call me Mr. Grits.”