Sausage Party – Film Review

Directors: Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon
Writers: Kyle Hunter (screenplay), Ariel Shaffir
Stars: Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, Kristen Wiig

Sausage Party is the story of a Sausage in love with a Bun. The Sausage in question is called Frank (Seth Rogen) and he is in a package with five other hot dogs. They are waiting to be bought in a local super market. Right next to this package of sausages, there are six buns who are in a similar position. One of these buns is called Brenda (Kristen Wiig) and she is Frank’s intended. They long to be bought together and taken by the Gods (humans) to the Great Beyond, which lies outside the confines of the store. But is this heavenly place all it is promised to be?

This is a very unusual film. It is one of the most expensive animations to be aimed at adults, as it has all the hallmarks of a typical Pixar film. It does have a surprisingly modest budget of $20m compared to Finding Dory’s $200m. The cast is very impressive with A-list celebrities such as Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, James Franco, Danny McBride, Paul Rudd, Edward Norton and Salma Hayek. With a cast such as this, you get the feeling that a lot of the actors wanted to be involved with this film, as they felt it could be remembered in years to come. Could this be the dawning of a new genre of adult animations? Rogen has already discussed a possibility of sequel.

“It’s something we talk about, yeah. That’s one of the reasons why we took away the [original] ending”

The initial premise of the film is quite smart and there are many very funny in-jokes and irreverent scenes as the food stuffs try to figure out their place in the world. There are hints of sci-fi films such as Soylent Green, as they believe the lie they have been told, that the humans that buy them are Gods and aim to take them to a better place, instead of the horrible truth.

Adult cartoons have long been a staple of Television, with shows such as South Park and Family Guy running for hundreds of episodes. The only real difference with this film is the quality of the animation on display. The TV series mentioned are relatively inexpensive and focus more on the writing than the animation. It is something of a shock to see perfectly animated creatures curse and swear, but in truth that shock is short lived.

There are many scenes that will have you laughing out loud, but there are a number of sequences that lose their focus. It’s difficult to keep a high concept film such as this moving, and the writers struggled to keep producing the goods. The opening is quite strong but after the initial high, it falls back into a story line not a world away from a typical Disney, as the characters go on a journey to try and discover the truth. There are also a number of jokes that make fun of minorities that are quite close to the bone.

The jokes are often vulgar and deal with bodily processes, with sex and drugs featuring heavily. It’s aimed squarely at teenage boys and it’s likely to find a large audience in this sector of society. I could see this film doing very well and spawning a number of sequels. Whether this short blast of originality is enough to merit box office success is a difficult question to answer. The writing is relatively patchy, with some very enjoyable sequences and also a lot of filler.