If you’ve ever wondered what the supermarket experience is like from the food’s perspective—and you revel in dark, boundary-pushing and unabashedly dirty humour—then this star-studded adult animation that follows one sausage’s journey of enlightenment may just tickle your pickle.
Frank the sausage (Seth Rogan) and Brenda the bun (Kristen Wiig) are in love. As they sit next to each other on the supermarket shelf, they long for the day they will be out of the packet and able to finally be together—as all good sausages and buns are.
Having spent their whole life in the supermarket, they have watched anxiously as their fellow food has been hand-selected to depart with their human owners, going off to ‘the great beyond’, where they’re told a heaven-like life together awaits.
But, when a honey-flavoured mustard returns from the great beyond (having been accidentally selected in mistake of regular mustard), he paints a very different and disturbing picture—one where the humans (or gods, as they’ve come to be known) don’t carry them off to nirvana, but rather cannibalise and butcher them in all sorts of hideous ways. It’s terrifying.
At first, Honey Mustard is dismissed as being mad; but, how much do they really know about what happens after they leave the supermarket? Frank seeks the truth, and journeys to the non-perishables aisle (where the oldest and wisest of the supermarket products live) to gain answers.
His decision to question the gods is met with resistance, and his journey is fraught with danger—but, joined by a bagel and a lavosh (you can see what they’re doing here?!) who hold slightly different world views, Frank feels he’s seen too much to ignore, and it’s a journey he simply has to take.
Sausage Party is a wild ride; and it is most definitively not for the faint hearted or easily offended. Much of the film is in very poor taste, as if written while under the influence. And yet, for what it is, it’s done exceedingly well.
While it’s primarily a comedy—and an outrageous one, at that—it’s also quite clever in the way it uses food as an analogy for how racial stereotypes and religious doctrine can be both absurd and unnecessarily divisive. If it wasn’t so on point with its satire (although admittedly using a very blunt instrument), it might easily be dismissed as a stoner film, but it’s much more than that.
Sausage Party is not for everyone. In fact, I’m sure many will find it utterly offensive. But, if it takes a film about an animated sausage and a bun, laced with toilet humour and extreme sexual puns, to provide a modern-day existential critique of the lunacy of human nature and modern racial and religious discourse, then I’m all for it.
Nietzsche’s critique of religion and power may be a touch more sophisticated, but still it’s not a bad effort for a sausage—who’s clearly anything but silly—but this movie should by no means be approached seriously.
Director: Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon
Stars: Seth Rogan, Kristin Wiig, Selma Hayek, Michael Cera, Paul Rudd
Runtime: 99 mins
Release Date: August 11
Rating: R
Reviewer Rating: 4/5