Say what you like about Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg: they dance with the ones that brung them. And since the ones that brung them are foul-mouthed, filth-obsessed dopeheads, Sausage Party is well up to standard. It’s an insanely surreal animated comedy about talking supermarket food (who said they’ve been smoking too much?), which is finished with all the polish of a Pixar or Blue Sky production. But it ventures (or should that be staggers woozily) into territory no one else would dare to. The final consumables-orgy scene is the one that got censors in a twist across the globe; and, while the spectacle of food items going at each other every which way is, to put it mildly, unlike anything ever seen before in mainstream entertainment, it’s actually the bit where Sausage Party’s otherwise brilliant brain finally turns to mush.
Because, as is their wont, Rogen and Goldberg have used the carapace of gross-out and screw-up as a vehicle for something that possesses pin-sharp smartness and is really rather moving in all its oddball freakiness. (Directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan, who have worked on everything from Madagascar 3 to Thomas the Tank Engine, shouldn’t be forgotten in all this.) Rogen is – what else? – a sausage, looking to nestle in the voluptuous folds of a Glamour hotdog bun (voiced by Kristen Wiig) on the same supermarket shelf. While this central idea is a bit 1982, it’s the detail of the surrounding story architecture that allows the film to take flight.
For example, all the produce are in thrall to the belief that, when they are selected by shoppers (AKA “gods”), they will be transported to some kind of heavenly paradise. From this, Evan and Goldberg have worked out a wonderfully complex satire on organised religion, the like of which no other film could get away with. It’s but a short skip to some blunt points about Israel-Palestine, courtesy of two bread-based characters: a Muslim lavash and a Jewish bagel – the latter played, with full Woody Allen-effect kvetching, by Edward Norton, of all people.
Sausage Party won’t please everyone – the relentless boysiness of it all, and the inevitable moments where the horndog comedy lurches into misjudged bantz – but this is a rarity among 2016’s films in which the laugh-o-meter remains ticking over at a furious rate. Funny, smart and disgusting: Rogen and Goldberg have pulled it off, as it were.
