Sausage Party  (2016)

I expected much worse. I had friends who saw this in theaters and warned me about how bad it was, basically telling me to not bother. Never one to heed advice, I sat down to watch this, hoping my daughter was old enough to be entertained by the animation while still being young enough to not understand any of what was happening.

Pixar has built an empire on anthropomorphizing everything.

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Essentially, Rogen and Co got super-duper high and said "let's make our own twisted Pixar movie - what if food had feelings?" then all laughed for 20 minutes until someone said "wait, what were we laughing about? oh right, food!" and then wrote a movie.

The thing is, it's actually a pretty solid concept. If Pixar had taken the idea first, it could have been a legit kids movie. "Toy Story" set up the idea that our toys were alive when we turned our backs, so why not just apply that to food?

All the food believes that when they leave the store, they go to the "Great Beyond", a place of eternal joy and happiness. When a jar of honey mustard gets returned, he tells horror stories of what humans really do to food. A hot dog, bun, bagel and a piece of lavash end up in a wild chase, trying to warn the rest of the food while escaping a maniacal douche (literally).

The animation was good, it fit into the cutesy kids movie style, while maintaining plenty of things that would fly over a kid's head. The voice-work was fine - outside of Bill Hader and Ed Norton and David Krumholtz, no one really did a voice that wasn't their own. Seth Rogen and Kristen Wiig and Salma Hayek and McBride and Cera and Hill just used their regular voices.

I might be in a growing minority, but I still enjoy Seth Rogen. I like the whole crew of Judd Apatow, Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Craig Robinson, Paul Rudd, Danny McBride, and the rest. None of their movies are classics, but they're all the sort of thing that shows up on cable and I can leave on while in the background while I check email or make dinner, still laughing at the gags, but not heavily invested in. And sometimes, that's all you really need.

 

 

[Celluloid Hero] gives "Sausage Party" a 6 out of 10.

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