Director: Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan
Starring: The voices of Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Michael Cera, Nick Kroll, Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, James Franco, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Paul Rudd
Distributor: Sony Pictures
Runtime: 89 mins. Reviewed in Aug 2016

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Rating notes: Strong crude sexual humour, coarse language and drug use

In Shopwell’s supermarket, with July 4th celebrations approaching, the food items are overflowing with excitement at the prospect of being chosen to go home with shoppers. A show tune bursts into life, penned by Oscar winner Alan Menken, with lyrics about the ‘Great Beyond’ and the pleasures that await them beyond the walls of the store. So far, so Pixar-lite – giving foodstuffs a secret life invisible to humans is by no stretch breaking new ground; see ‘Toy Story’, ‘Bugs’, ‘Finding Nemo’ et al. for the blueprint. But this is where the similarities end, as the food begins cursing and dropping innuendos, ethnic products like tacos become racial caricatures, and themes like war, faith and suicide are broached as punch lines. No taboo is left alone and the film gleefully looks to offend everyone. Yet it has one trump card up its sleeve: it is often and consistently laugh out loud funny.

Our protagonist is Frank, an anthropomorphised sausage with arms and legs voiced by the gruff Seth Rogen, whose pack is chosen by a customer to take home. He and his slightly misshaped friend Barry, lent the voice of comedic regular Michael Cera, can’t believe their luck when the same shopper selects the pack of buns containing Frank’s girlfriend, Brenda, boasting a spirited vocal performance by Kristen Wiig. The innuendo of the sausage and bun pairing is a source of great amusement to the filmmakers, and your own response may be emblematic of your response to the film as a whole.

To the goods, humans are ‘gods’, and to be chosen is to enter eternity in the Great Beyond. Their celebrations are cut short when a jar of honey mustard, returned to the store by a customer and now babbling about the genocide of food products in the outside world, leaps off the trolley to its demise. In the ensuing disturbance, Frank, Brenda, Sammy Bagel Jr (Edward Norton) and Vash (David Krumholtz) are thrown from the trolley.

This scene is worth discussing as a representation of the film’s overall quality. In the accident, a bag of flour is among the foods knocked from the trolley. It explodes, shooting its contents into the air, and through the white haze, directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan launch a spot on homage to classic war films. A can of spaghetti tries to spoon spilt strands back through a hole in its tin. A banana staggers raggedly, before its face peels off and it drops to its knees. An Oreo picks up a chocolate wafer before turning to reveal bare cream – it is in fact its own wafer, knocked off in the fall. It’s staged as both horror and comedy, and succeeds in both, bringing a visual flair which American comedies have noticeably lacked for several years. Its riffing on such classic iconography reveals the depth of thought that has gone into the movie, thanks to writers Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir, even if the surface is cluttered with juvenile gags and obvious double entendre.

As Frank and his friends traverse the supermarket, they uncover the horrifying secrets of the Great Beyond. At the same time, Frank’s fellow sausages are learning these secrets the hard way, in a distressing scene which sets eating anthropomorphic food as essentially on par with cannibalism. Only Barry escapes, and tries to return to the Shopwell’s to warn the others, just as Frank is undertaking a similar mission to educate the various aisles from within. The third act reaches a level of madness that I had previously never witnessed in an animated film, and pushes the boundaries of good taste about as far as the MA15+ rating will let it.

With just a $19 million budget (less than one-tenth of most Pixar flicks!), the movie is impressively mounted with decent animation, a cast boasting a depth of great actors and comedians, and a stirring score. But the kicker is that, all the way up to the ridiculously over the top and crude finale, ‘Sausage Party’ maintains its most important feature – constant jokes that stick with a high landing rate (if you have a compatible sense of humour). It’s certainly not family fare, but it’s a hearty laugh nonetheless.