When I first heard Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were doing an animated film called Sausage Party, I got nervous. While being a decent fan of their collective work, I worried that a film like Sausage Party would… well, just be dick jokes. They’re prone to write them, Rogen’s not apposed to dishing them out, the main characters are phallic shaped. Hell, the damn title is *Sausage* *Party*. I figured this would be a potentially failed experiment from the duo… but hope suddenly sprung eternal with the release of the first trailer for the film.
The premise of the film feeds into a sort of dark twist on the likes of Toy Story: What if food were sentient? In this case, our main heroes include a package of sausages (voiced by Rogen, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Anders Holms & others), a hot dog bun (voiced by Kristin Wiig), a bagel (voiced by Edward Norton) and a few other food items from a grocery store. All of the food hopes and dreams of being picked out by people to meet their destiny, whatever that may be. Luckily, they’re soon picked out and brought to what they think is paradise via shopping cart. Unfortunately, they see the true horror of the fate of food as their friends are skinned, mutilated and eaten alive by a human. Now, these groceries are off to try and warn the supermarket’s other occupants of their impending doom before they too are consumed. The trailer follows below:
Now that looks far better than I ever would have expected. The animation, while feeling like the lower end of an Illumination Entertainment’s budget, still has a charm to it in terms of the character designs and the horrible mutilations of them like that Irish Potato’s disturbingly gut busting skinning scene. Rogen and Goldberg’s tinge of horror into the proceedings shows a lot of promise, especially for the Saving Private Ryan Normandy Beach scene that caps the trailer off on a darkly amusing note. I just wonder if they’ll ease up on some of the more typical Rogen comedy aspects like vulgarities and drug jokes won’t be a giant crutch on the film’s humor. After all, hard R-Rated animation doesn’t need to just rely on that for humor. That joke runs out of steam unless there’s more to it, which the filmmakers could conceivably do as a spoof of the Pixar and Disney films of late that could use a good poking.
