Sausage Party

One of the more unusual animated films you will ever see. I never saw Fritz the Cat, Ralph Bakshi’s 1972 animated film based on a character created by Robert Crumb, which got an X rating from the MPAA, so I don’t know just how raunchy it was. But I’m betting it wasn’t as explicit as this.

The premise is simple: All the products for sale at your local supermarket are actually sentient beings. They believe that when they are put into the magic basket and checked out and bagged, they are going to a paradise. They are unaware that they are going to be brutally dismembered and eaten alive until a jar of mustard is returned and tells of the horror he saw. Frank (Seth Rogan) is a wiener and Brenda (Kristen Wiig) is a hot dog bun. (Wiener and bun. A wiener goes into a bun. Get it?) Then a lot of stuff happens, and the movie ends.

Believe me, I am the last person who would want to censor any sort of language, or situation. With me, anything goes in a comedy …as long as it’s funny. Far too little of this is. It is the kind of humor where people giggle because someone says “fuck.” A lot. I mean, one fuck of a lot. Just about every other word is fuck. This, in itself, is not funny. After about the fiftieth iteration of that expletive, I found myself wishing they’d just fucking shut up. Because there isn’t much else going here.

Oh, okay, I’ll give the writers props for having a lot of clever puns and other plays on words … but most of them go by so quickly in the background that you will miss half of them. This struck me as a lot of effort to be as shocking as possible, and failing to either shock or get laughs. But they spent nineteen million dollars on this thing and it made a hundred million, so expect a sequel in the near future.