Fish and Cherries Productions

Summary: The food of the supermarket all have one aspiration: to go to the Promised Land beyond the doors. A sausage named Frank (Seth Rogen) and a bun named Brenda (Kristen Wiig) want this so badly that they’re abstaining from leaving their packages to be together. That way, they’ll be clean in the eyes of the gods with the shopping carts and therefore be chosen when the gods come on Red, White, and Blue Day (American Independence Day, for any international readers). Of course, anyone who’s ever… well, eaten in their life knows what’s really awaiting them outside the store, but our edible protagonists don’t know that and thus despair when a cart crash happens and they get separated from their packages. In their quest to get back to their aisle, they come across many colorful foods that butt heads, a literal douche (Nick Kroll) who won’t leave them alone, and finding out the horrible truth behind everything.

Review: Sausage Party was unbridled insanity and I enjoyed it quite a bit. This is how you do parody and black comedy, so all future writers should take notes. Granted, some people may not go for comedy quite as gruesome, but the meaning behind everything is what should really be appreciated and even studied. The makers set out with the goal of parodying Pixar and judging by this film, they know their Pixar well. Pixar has a habit of giving emotions and personalities to many different things — toys, fish, actual emotions, and so on — so these guys applied that to food and took it to its natural conclusion. Like I said, they know what makes Pixar work and therefore can make a stronger parody, putting films like the Scary Movie franchise to shame.

I went in expecting the gruesome comedy and food puns, but what I wasn’t expecting was some spot on criticism of social and world issues. Despite this movie being marketed heavily as a comedy, there was a surprising amount of drama. The worship of the gods tackles flaws in organized religion and how desperate some people can be to appear “pure.” There’s a subplot (one of a few) of a bagel (Edward Norton) and a lavash (David Krumholtz) who dislike each other because of a long standing feud between their people fighting for space in the same aisle, an obvious stand-in for the conflict in Israel. The movie also tackles themes of sexual repression, changing religion to match your own biases, and even some harsh looks at drug abuse, sexual assault, and even insensitivity to other people’s beliefs. Pretty bold subjects for a movie with a penis joke title.

That said, there are quite a few laughs to be had and a lot of them come from the visual puns, which go a lot further than having a Meat Loaf song being sung by a meatloaf. Corn stuck in feces are characterized as zombies, there’s the literal douche being a figurative douche, the ethnic food has matching ethnicities*, and the liquor aisle is one giant party, just to name a few. It certainly helps that Seth Rogen is working alongside some of his regulars, like Bill Hader, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride, and James Franco. It’s practically a reunion for Superbad and This Is The End, both very funny movies.

*I was originally conflicted about the accents with the ethnic foods having accents, at first thinking that it was culturally insensitive. But after some thought, I came to the conclusion that not doing that would be a form of cultural appropriation, so yeah, this is fine.

The ending is a giant blowout in so many ways that I think it’s best to keep it a surprise. Let’s just say that the climax is fast-paced and a good endpoint to this journey. My review doesn’t do the movie justice because there’s so much story in here that the summary would be quadruple the normal length. Some people will get turned off by the raunchiness and graphic violence, but they weren’t going to see it anyway so this review won’t do a thing for them. If you’ve got the stomach, feel free to chow down on Sausage Party.

Fun Tidbit: This movie had a troubled production from way back in the beginning. Seth Rogen had been unsuccessfully pitching this idea for eight years until 2014, when Sony came to his rescue… and even that was almost ruined by the Sony email hack. Unfortunately, the trouble didn’t stop there. There have been numerous stories about the animation team being treated very poorly, with lots of unpaid overtime, threats of termination, and half of the team being uncredited. I try to separate my feelings of a studio/person from the work that they produce in any review, but that doesn’t mean I won’t call them out when they treat their workers badly. Not cool, Nitrogen Studios. Not cool at all.