Sausage Party

Release date: August 12, 2016 (Canada)

Directors: Conrad Vernon, Greg Tiernan

Edited by Kevin Pavlovic

Production companies: Nitrogen Studios, Annapurna Pictures, Point Grey Pictures

⅘ Bones

It’s a well-known fact that inside everyone lives a 13-year-old boy. His first language is Sarcasm and his second is Eye-rolling.  He doodles penises on his desk and notebooks and sometimes sticks them in the bag of a pretty girl. He thinks saying swear words make him more grown-up but has to stop himself from giggling when he murmurs ‘fuck you’ to his teacher’s retreating back.

It’s also well known that inside everyone is a fifty-year-old cynic who is tired of the world and frustrated with what appears to be the irrepressible, incomprehensible contentedness of their neighbours. One day, your cynic says, they’ll wake up and see how miserable everything really is.

I also have good news for you - there’s now a movie for both of them, and the rest of you as well. Because incredibly that combination has made one of the best films I’ve seen in years. And I’ve spent these last few knee-deep in film school, so you can take that to the bank. Or possibly Haneke just broke any ability I had to understand what entertainment even is.

I’ll admit I was nervous about this film. The future of Western Adult Animation rode on its shoulders. The hopes and dreams of many animation lovers for more rested in the hands of...Seth Rogen.

Now, I’ve liked Rogen’s other films fine. But this movie needed to be amazing. The history of theatrically released adult animated films is full of bombs and box office failure. Another dud would ensure another decade of drought.

I feared in vain. On this day, the flatulent gods of satire have smiled down on Seth Rogen and made him their prophet. This is easily his best work and it will make history as the film that started a tsunami of adult animation into cinemas. Now I just have to worry about those cheap cash-ins thinking that what made Sausage Party successful was its willingness to include ‘Fuck’, both verbally and literally. Yes, it did have that. A lot of that. However, it was smart enough to realize that while that may be enough for a Robot Chicken sketch, it would not sustain a 90 minute film. What would? Well, what sustains most films: A cast of characters with relatable struggles and creatively explored themes. Plus a lot of bad puns. Between this and Zootopia, I don’t think Hollywood has a pun left in stock. I don’t know how they cook all of them up. They’ve beet me to the punch on every available one. It’s’all on me (read: salami) to come up with the most tortured homophones to fatten up my review. I must-ard, er, ask, you to put up with my personal linguistic vices throughout this review. It really is too gouda to miss.

Pixar has long needed to be parodied, and this film has it in spades. It takes the concept of sentient objects to hilarious extremes, and when one joke flops over there are ten more to take its place. Outside of the aforementioned Robot Chicken, there just haven’t been many buckets in this satirical well, and the material is all fresh and before its sell-by date. I will say that as racist, sexist, and every other -ist the jokes are, they are -ist in a way that’s, well...fun. There’s no sense of superiority or punching-down humour here. Even though there is a nose-tap and wink joke to the camera to let the audience know that the creators are aware of the -istness and its outdatedness, it was unnecessary. No character is reduced to a single -ist joke, and there really is heart to all them. This is a film about hedonism beyond even Dorian Gray’s wildest night, and to have cruel gags and callous one-liners would ruin that mood. If Seth McFarlane had written this movie, it would have left an aftertaste of shame and guilt, and I probably wouldn’t have cheered for anyone. In this film, I cared about Frank the frankfurter’s disillusioned quest for knowledge, I cared for Brenda’s divided loyalties between belief and love, I cared about the lesbian taco’s confusion between her desires and her doctrine, I cared about blossoming frenemyship between the lavash and the bagel, and I cheered for Barry the misshapen hotdog when he delivered the best shock humour moment in the whole affair. Seriously, that was one of the best backgrounds for a cute sausage to be in front of.

And when it comes to the theme...hoh, boy, did they pick the right girl to aim this movie at. Beware the footnotes for this section. I’m a recovering catholic who attended religious school from K-12, was an Altar Server¹ at the local church, attended Christian Summer Camps and read the bible cover to cover more than once before I hit adolescence. However, during that whole time you could find me waiting outside the priest’s office to ask him an endless list of questions, getting into ideological debates on the role of women in the church with my band teacher² getting into another debate about the personhood of animals with my Math teacher in front of the whole class³ (he started it, I swear), and getting into further debate about biblical condonning of slavery with my bible camp counsellor/riding instructor⁴. That last one ended with me having my horse switched from lovable gelding to Satan’s own stallion.

 As you can see from that rather intense last paragraph⁵, this is a deep can of worms for me. So anything that can address that chasm of exasperation, despair, and hard-headedness with any kind of thought is going to make me pay attention. This film takes on the concept of religion and atheism with a deftness that can only be borne of uncertainty. What’s nice is that there’s an attempt to understand both sides here - that religion can be a coping mechanism to the horror of mortality, and that atheists can treat those people like willful idiots and offer only despair. It was easy to laugh and empathize with every character caught up in their constructed culture of happiness.  Sausage Party is a landmark, but it’s one worth getting out of the car for ⁶ I en-treat you to give this one a chance. Give the theatres some of your hard-earned bread to prove that there’s a market...nay, a super-market for animation aimed at a mature audience. Maybe we’ll just get slop. But maybe, just maybe…

We can ketchup to where Japan’s been for the last three decades.

***Further Notes

• So, a lot of this food is made from animals. I’m not sure I want to tell these guys where they came from. Life is already pretty dismaying for them. But does that mean we go from one sentient cow to 500 sentient hotdogs? Are they the continued consciousness of the cow? But then there are sentient buns. Does this mean wheat is sentient in this universe? I mean why not? But they have no memories of being cows or wheat so does that mean that when they’re reprocessed they’re reincarnated, literally? Does that mean the humans are just collections of reincarnated food consciousness? Does...No, stop...no, stop, you’re hurting me, Brain.

• That’s why they parodied Pixar in the first place. To take that concept to its inevitable, soul-destroying conclusion.

• I hardly ever buy popcorn in theatres. But knowing I’d see that Scotiabank title card with the anthropomorphic kernels that think they’re off to save the universe...well, it felt like a part of the film, honestly. It was too fun to eat those heroic, misguided kernels.

• Honesty time. I didn’t know a douche was a real thing. What a way to be introduced to the concept. Euch. So does this mean my go-to friendly insult has been about those all along? In French, une douche is just a shower. I thought a douchebag was like, I dunno, a laundry hamper. Man. I am so naive…

• So...this is basically a response to Food Fight, right? It just has to be. I swear I saw references.

***Note of Bias

• One of my roommates worked on the film at Nitrogen studios. It was awesome seeing your name on the big screen, Kate!

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  1 Though probably the worst one they had. I started out afraid of matches. Our only job is to light and carry candles. I had one job. It’s a miracle I didn’t set the priest on fire. ^↩
  2 Apparently bringing the snacks is a fulfilling role and women just can’t be priests because then they’d have to marry the church and the church is female and we can’t make a lesbian out of the church. Why is the church female? Because the church is married to Jesus. ^↩
  3 Against his religious perspective that animals were put here for our use. Apparently If you’re out of tissues and have a fluffy guinea pig, God says ‘That’s why I made them fluffy. Wipe away.’^↩
  4 I don’t even know why she picked the verse that condones slavery as our reading for the day. When confronted with the question ‘Does this condone slavery?’ she said yes, and since it was in the bible that must mean slavery was okay in some circumstances. At which point I made a point of opening the bible to Exodus. To emphasis said point, I then made my own Exodus from the tent and stormed off. This version has abridged the parts where I incredulously rephrased my question several times to ensure that yes, she really did think slavery was okay sometimes.^↩
  5 And even more embarrassingly intensely personal footnotes. These things are tough to code into Blogger, so I had every chance to not put them in. I could’ve saved you this pain. ^↩
  6 Instead of just spinning the Pokéstop and moving on.^↩