Review: SAUSAGE PARTY

SAUSAGE PARTY  
(COMEDY/ANIMATION)
3 out of 4 stars
Directed by Greg Tiernan & Conrad Vernon
Featuring the Voices of: Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, James Franco, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Paul Rudd, Nick Kroll, David Krumholtz, Edward Norton, Salma Hayek, Lauren Miller, Anders Holm, Scott Underwood
Rated R for strong crude sexual content, pervasive language, and drug use.
88 minutes
Verdict: Quite literally shameless, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen's latest collaboration overcomes the limitations of low-budget animation for a funny, filthy and somewhat thoughtful assault on everything your mothers taught you.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN SAUSAGE PARTY IF YOU LIKED:
THIS IS THE END  (2013)
THE NIGHT BEFORE  (2015)
SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT  (1999)
TED  (2012)
THE INTERVIEW  (2014)

The writing, producing and occasionally directing creative team of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have made at least a couple of the greatest comedies in the last decade as far as I'm concerned.  They wrote SUPERBAD, a wild, woolly and surprisingly heartfelt coming-of-age story, and wrote, directed and produced THIS IS THE END, a painfully hilarious religious apocalypse-themed farce.  They're weird and twisted and high-concept, and there was that one time that one of their movies literally almost started World War III.  Their latest film is advertised as the "first R-rated computer-animated movie," and has been riding an enthusiastic critical wave ever since an unfinished version premiered at the South by Southwest film festival in March.  It's pretty good, but it may have been a little over-hyped.  Then again, its primary promise is to show cartoon characters saying and doing shockingly R-rated things, which it delivers on handsomely, while being unexpectedly thoughtful in its philosophies besides.

The story primarily takes place within the Shopwell grocery store, just your average little grocery where all the food begins each day singing "The Great Beyond" (an all-new original tune from one of Disney Animation's most prolific composers, Alan Menken, who also co-wrote the orchestral score) in worship to the "gods" (human shoppers) who will take them to the "Great Beyond" outside the store, a paradise where they all get to go as reward for following all the rules, so long as they don't get cast into the abyss (garbage) by the Dark Lord (the Shopwell manager, v. Paul Rudd) before they get the chance.  Frank (v. Seth Rogen) is a sausage in a package he shares with several others like the slightly misshapen Barry (v. Michael Cera), and Carl (v. Jonah Hill), shelved next to the hot dog buns, among which is Frank's great love, Brenda (v. Kristen Wiig).  When they finally are chosen for a customer's cart, a returned jar of Honey Mustard (v. Danny McBride) tries warn everyone of the true terrors that await beyond the Shopwell doors before committing suicide in an incident that leaves Frank and Brenda loose and without their packages, in addition to a number of other products including a stereotypically Muslim fundamentalist lavash called Vash (v. David Krumholtz) and a Woody Allen-esque bagel called Sammy (v. Edward Norton).  While Barry and Carl continue to the Great Beyond, a now-stranded Frank is compelled to investigate Honey Mustard's claims, leading him to the council of the wise non-perishables, the hard-partying liquor aisle and the far away freezer aisle on a quest to understand his purpose while straining his relationship to Brenda.  Meanwhile, another victim of the Honey Mustard spill, a now-damaged Douche (v. Nick Kroll), pursues Frank and Brenda with vengeance on his mind, blaming them for interfering with his purpose.
Budgeted at a safe $19 million (a small enough sum to allow Rogen and Goldberg's team to realize their collective vision with minimal studio interference), it's fair to say that the animation is serviceable at best (ironically, it's miles ahead of fellow computer-animated grocery store adventure FOODFIGHT!, a so-bad-it's-hilarious 2012 release budgeted at $45 million), and frequently, the exaggerated cartoon characters are grotesque.  Then again, so is much of what they're doing onscreen.  Rogen/Goldberg films have a way of taking a disgusting joke so far that it just becomes disgusting, but then bringing back around again to being even funnier once you come to terms with just how disgusting it is, a practice they employ again and again in SAUSAGE PARTY, a movie that, perhaps inadvertently, makes you wonder about the purposes of the R rating and how, in comparison, the makers of SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT famously tangled difficultly with the MPAA ratings board over avoiding an NC-17 rating (much has been made of the 8-minute orgy sequence involving various foods which is, well, hoo-boy...).  So the animation, while not exactly pretty, is at least ugly in exchange for creative freedom, as opposed to the cynical economical approach of a studio like Illumination Entertainment, and even if it's ugly, it looks a lot better than you'd expect at $19 million.

It's a fable on the side of atheism (with a healthy dose of pro-hedonism), which I personally am not crazy about, but its approach surprisingly smart and admirably ambitious despite being wrapped up neatly in proud stupidity, getting maximum mileage out of its anthropomorphic food conceit and concluding with a progression that makes me hope for an even better sequel.  One of the strongest running gags relates to the Israel-Palestine conflict in the form of Sammy and Vash's rivalry, whose respective kinds hate one another over the issue of shared shelf space, but if that's not your thing, there are also an abundance of food puns, most of which are groan-worthy, but some are pretty solid.  Where I think Rogen and Goldberg really thrive though is in comedy involving violence, whether it be the Zac Efron vs. Seth Rogen fight in NEIGHBORS or the gory horrors of THIS IS THE END, and those moments in SAUSAGE PARTY probably yielded my biggest laughs.
Animated with happy little sausages sporting thin black arms and white gloves, curvaceous hot dog buns with more than the hint of a butt crack, and an impressive array of racial caricatures represented in grocery products, it's an incredibly filthy assault on decency, one that's pretty funny, but maybe a bit over-hyped.

Images via Sony Pictures