Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Sausage Party — a religious allegory starring groceries — made history twice when it landed in theaters this August. From co-writers/producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (the duo who wrote Superbad, Pineapple Express, and This Is The End), Sausage Party was the first R-rated CGI film and it currently reins as the top-earning animated flick for those 17-and-up (surpassing South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut and Team America: World Police with $140 million at the box office worldwide). Pretty impressive, especially for a movie this punny: “I relish the fact that you mustered the strength to catch up to me.”
Batting their eyelashes and exchanging winks each day at Shopwell’s, the foods hope that a God (customer) will carry them to The Great Beyond in paper or plastic. A returned jar of honey mustard (Danny McBride) fails to convince his fellow perishables that they are actually made to be eaten (i.e. murdered), and leaps to his death. The shatter causes two carts to crash, scattering the protagonists: a sausage named Frank Weinerton (Rogen); his hot dog bun girlfriend, Brenda Bunson (Kristen Wiig); his sausage friends, Carl (Jonah Hill) and Barry (Michael Cera); and soon-to-be-roider/villain Douche (Nick Kroll, who played the shock jock sidekick on Parks and Recreation‘s “Crazy Ira and The Douche”). Some of the survivors venture to new aisles, others to a stovetop.
We witness how easily meal stuffs become metaphors, with Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton, doing a letter-perfect imitation of his Everybody Says I Love You director, Woody Allen) and Kareem Abdul Lavash (David Krumholtz) as stand-ins for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, lesbian-leaning Theresa del Taco (Salma Hayek) and Mr. Grits (Craig Robinson), who’s at odds with The Crackers. There’s also a wise Native American proxy named Firewater (Bill Hader) who gave credence to The Great Beyond myth so his shelf neighbors “would go out those doors happy instead of shitting themselves,” as good a reason as any for why so many people believe in heaven sans scientific evidence.
But the film ends with two ingenious action sequences. First the snacks topple their non-saviors (voiced by the likes of James Franco and Paul Rudd) with rapid-fire gumballs and licorice lace restraints, the start of a murderous rampage. Then they celebrate victory with a skull-spinning orgy that once clocked in at eight minutes. Remember the illustrations in Superbad‘s closing credits, a collection featuring dick-shaped DNA coils, dick-shaped Titanic passengers, and dick-shaped dinosaurs? It warms my heart to think that the same bong-toking brainwaves thought up this scene. The filmmakers and animators truly outdid themselves here, inventing SO MANY sex acts for edibles to engage in (without referencing “mouthfeel”). Sadly, as The Washington Post confirmed in a headline, “The working conditions for some Sausage Party animators were pretty terrible,” and a union representing many of the Vancouver-based artists filed a complaint against production company Nitrogen Studios for allegedly denying them overtime pay.
Directed by Conrad Vernon (Monsters vs. Aliens, Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted) and Greg Tiernan (a veteran of numerous Thomas the Tank Enging projects, who owns Nitrogens Studios with his wife), Sausage Party‘s pop culture borrowings range from Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl performance to Stephen Hawking’s theories. The writers also reference approximately 40 different movies in 90 minutes, including a Last Tango in Paris quote that they almost certainly would have cut if Bernardo Bertolucci‘s comments about the 1972 film’s notorious sex scene resurfaced a few months earlier. I do wish the filmmakers had stuck with their initial instinct and kept Cera’s Barry — the sad-eyed, chipped-tooth runt — as the main character. Still, Sausage Party is a fine excuse to reconnect with your snickering middle school self. Curse words are pretty funny coming from the contents of your refrigerator.
