‘Matter cannot be created or destroyed, human. You have made a fatal error in judgement, let me educate you…’
Where to start? Sausage Party is unlike any other animated film I’ve ever seen. It has literally no precedent. Not since South Park went feature length has an animated film been so fucked up. That doesn’t necessarily make it good of course. There are times during Sausage Party when I felt I was watching the worst film I had ever seen but other moments seem drenched in genius, it is difficult to unscramble those disparate opinions to form a final verdict.
Sausage Party exists in a world where food is sentient and each item on the supermarket shelves is begging to be picked by the Gods (or just regular humans to you and me) and taken to The Great Beyond. When a group of hotdog sausages are picked up the whole lie of this system is revealed but it is up to one of the sausages to bla bla something something something. Honestly I feel like I lost a couple of IQ points just writing that. Dumb plot aside though there are times when Sausage Party feels like a really intelligent film. It is like Schrödinger’s movie. At once super smart and fucking daft. Hilarious and cringe worthy. Inspired and terrible. It toes this line far too often but mostly Sausage Party succeeds.
Not everything works but some of the visual gags are actually really clever and I’m a sucker for a good pun, of which there are many. Elongating this bizarre concept into a 90 minute feature length film feels a bit of a stretch but just when I thought the movie was running out of steam it goes all meta.
Seth Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg have taken on a high concept idea before with limited results, This is the End for example was a one note idea that outstayed its welcome. When compared to something like that Sausage Party has to be considered a success. Jesus, the fact that those guys got a movie made out a talking sausage at all deserves some plaudits, the startling realisation that it made nearly five times its budget back is just the screaming cherry atop the dancing cake.
Just consider this for a second, there is talk of a potential sequel to Sausage Party and the ending even encourages that idea, yet Terry Gilliam can’t get a movie made to save his life. It’s a strange world we live in…