SAUSAGE PARTY: Clean-up on Aisle Five

Directors: Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon
Writers: Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Jonah Hill
Cast: Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Michael Cera, Edward Norton, David Krumholtz, Salma Hayek, Nick Kroll, Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, James Franco, Paul Rudd
Runtime: 89 mins.
2016

Sausage Party is blatant, and Sausage Party is naughty. Sausage Party is both a coming of age story, and a story about community upheaval. Sausage Party thinks it's being really deep, but Sausage Party doesn't really think it's being deep.

Sausage Party is an animated film about a sentient hot dog named Frank.

The idea is that all the food at the grocery store is actually alive, even though we're not aware of it. This is actually explored more thoroughly than your typical "talking ______s in a world of humans" film, with the camera occasionally shifting to the humans' drab normal perspective. This is one of the many ways in which Sausage Party uses its form to strong effect. Another is the base pleasure of getting to see all this weird grocery food anthropomorphized in the most juvenile way possible. These characterizations are as a rule tied in with some crass joke about class, race, sexuality, religion, or gender. We'll get into that more later.

Frank (Seth Rogen) wants what any hot dog wants--to get taken to the Great Beyond by the gods (shoppers) and to be inserted into the love of his life, a hot dog bun named Brenda (Kristen Wiig), for some sweet sweet lovin'. Contact before that time is forbidden, because according to grocery store lore, the gods would find that to be impure, and you'd miss your chance at the afterlife. So Frank and Brenda stay in their packages, yearning for that fateful day. However, through a needlessly complicated series of events, Frank and Brenda find themselves out of their packages far away from their aisle, and Frank comes to be armed with the knowledge that the afterlife is not what foodkind thought it was.


I want to touch on three moments of the film that see Sausage Party leaning into what makes it unique and worthwhile. The first is an early song and dance number in which the food all sing about their beliefs in a combination wake-up call and ritual anthem. Going into the film I didn't know it would feature a show-stopping musical number, but it makes so much sense. It's the exact right kind of playful that you may as well be with a concept this silly, and it's also a terrific opportunity to fill out the world for the viewers, as the camera zips in and out of all the different aisles and the communities that have been created there. Also it is jam-packed with top notch jokes and visual gags.

The second moment is more of a visual motif featured throughout the film. When bad stuff happens to food, directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon do not hold back on the grotesquerie. These sequences are shot like a war film with chaotic editing, severe lighting, and long sequences of gruesome visual humor. Rogen and co. know that if they're going to make an R-rated animated film, it would be a missed opportunity if they didn't explore the nasty implications of anthropomorphizing food. It's not like anything I've seen before.

The last moment comes towards the end. At the risk of--ahh--spoiling anything, I'll try to be vague. Having averted disaster and come to some new conclusions about their world, the characters decide to embark on an orgiastic exploration of things they hadn't allowed themselves to do in the past. Much like the warfare, it's a sequence that is played up for the shock factor, and it totally works. The sheer absurdism, as well as the length of time the scene goes on, is both hilarious and somewhat insightful. It certainly says a lot about the characters and what they had been repressing.

That moment also functions as something of a redeeming turn for the racial and cultural divides that the movie consistently mocks. To be clear, if you're especially sensitive about identity politics, for the love of god don't see Sausage Party. It will offend you, and make no mistake--it is trying to. It's all of a piece with its theme: we put ourselves into all sorts of reductive and restrictive boxes thanks to the ideology we were given by our predecessors, and it makes us do and say ignorant things. Sausage Party is cynical, but it's ultimately positive--we can overcome those divides with a bit of love and a heaping helping of clear-headed logical thinking.

As such, its moral is blatant to the point of feeling like an angry teenager's screed against society. Which is okay! Not every story needs to be sophisticated, and Sausage Party will certainly be the favorite movie of a significant contingent of those angry teens. The message's coherence is ultimately what keeps the film's problematic aspects in check, though your mileage may vary on that.

Surprisingly, while the movie typically relies on broad stroke stereotypes, the most layered aspect of the narrative turns out to be one of the film's villains--a Douche played by Nick Kroll.* The Douche takes up the cliche of the womanizing bro, but rather than playing it as a one-note joke like most of the other side characters, the Douche gets some significant dimensionality. The only truly layered writing in the film surrounds this character and the way that his arc lays bare the fragile psychology of straight white womanizers.

*Props to Paul Rudd for portraying Darren, the hilarious secondary villain.

It's too bad the rest of the film doesn't quite live up to the moments I've highlighted, but there are a lot of people for whom Sausage Party will ring the right bells. Animation buffs will probably be among them, as American cinema has displayed a baffling aversion to adult content animated movies. As a nation we have this weird insistence that cartoons are for kids, a paradigm that has been subverted over the past few decades on television with shows like The Simpsons or anything on Adult Swim, but not so much in the film landscape. Sausage Party is a treat for that reason, although I personally had a bit of a hard time living in that goony animation style for an hour and a half. It's really ugly, though that is part and parcel of the whole thing.

3 / 5  BLOBS