Sausage Party

A general rule in comedy seems to be that you can do things in animation you can’t do with real people. This is why, say, South Park frequently gets away with being politically incorrect to degrees that might get a real-world comedian in trouble, and vulgar in ways that would land a live-action product an NC-17. 

Sausage Party leans heavily on that assumption. With the P.C. heat being off of it by virtue of being a cartoon (one where the characters aren’t even human), the film goes for every easy joke. A Jewish bagel (Edward Norton) and a Middle-Eastern lavash (David Krumholtz) are bickering side characters, for example. There’s a liquor bottle (Bill Hader) depicted as a Native American shaman, and a Mexican-accented taco (Salma Hayek) who’s also a lesbian (if you can’t connect the dots here, the movie does for you). And Nick Kroll voices a feminine product who lives up to his name in every sense of the word.

None of these caricatures seem to be coming from a mean place; Seth Rogen and his usual gang of collaborators may be dirty, but one thing they are not is mean (with the sometimes-exception of Danny McBride, gloriously so). But many of the gags are so obvious, the physical embodiment of puns that make you groan a little. So are the sex jokes, taking every dirty lark about phallic-shaped food you remember from middle school lunch hour to its logical extreme.

It’s very juvenile stuff. It’s also pretty damn funny.

You could call it Toy Story with food. Only instead of simply adding R-rated jokes to the Pixar-esque premise of sentient objects, it cleverly examines some of the darker and more adult possibilities such a world might suggest. In this case, all the living products in a supermarket believe the shoppers are gods, and that being bought is being chosen to go to Heaven. This bubble is burst, however, when a traumatized returned honey mustard bottle (McBride) relates how this is all a lie. After hearing this, sausage Frank (Rogen) and his bun girlfriend Brenda (Kristen Wiig) travel across the store to find out the truth, while purchased sausage Barry (Michael Cera) sees it firsthand and tries to make his way back to the store to warn everybody.

Yes, a movie about foulmouthed hot dogs has some things to say about religion, although unless it meets the criteria for fulfilling one's antitheist confirmation bias, it’s probably a little too general to be called satire. Instead, the film is much more spot-on in its takedown of all the tropes of family animation, from the look and plot elements of a Pixar picture, to Disney-like musical numbers, to its caricatures aping the indelicate ethnic villains or comic relief in so much children’s entertainment. Also, with this cast, of course there's plenty of stoner humor, with some truly hilarious drug jokes worked inventively into the plot.

What can I say? Rogen and company have an undeniable charm about them, and it still shines through the faces of anthropomorphic edibles. As a genre parody and as just another excuse to spend 90 joyous minutes with these guys, Sausage Party is a treat.