SAUSAGE PARTY

With voices by Seth Rogan, Kristin Wiig, Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, Michael Cera, James Franco, Danny McBride, Paul Rudd, Salma Hayek, Edward Norton

Written by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir
Directed by Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon

In a world of sweet / fun / silly / kid-oriented morality tales told by Pixar and Dreamworks, it was just a matter of time until a more subversive (but still relatively mainstream) element would highjack the CGI controls for something far more adult, crude, rude and banal! (like the cell animated version of R. Crumb's Fritz The Cat in the early-'70s and the Southpark guys with Thunderbirds-style puppets in Team America in 2004).
And the man-child spearheading this one? Seth Rogan (including his writing partner Evan Goldberg) - and you can expect their buddies to be on board with Hill, Hader, Rudd, Franco, Cera all in tow.

The setting is the Shopwell supermarket, where the food products talk and interact, and believe that when humans buy them, they get taken to the "Great Beyond". However, the truth soon reveals itself - they get chopped up, boiled, fried and eaten!
One hotdog sausage in particular (who has the hots for one particular bun) rises as their (possible) saviour.

Funny, silly, nasty, explicit, sexually charged, audacious and way out there, Sausage Party is a long time coming and will tick all the boxes for many viewers (especially teens and twenty-something stoners!).
I can't help but wonder how many un-attentive parents won't see the "Adults Only" warning on the cover and grab this from the shelf thinking it's an animated movie that will keep their kids out of their hair for 90 minutes!

Extra features include a look inside the voice recording booth; how an idea like this gets pitched, the soundtrack is laid out (which was properly scored by Alan Menken and recorded by an orchestra at Abbey Road Studios, not a one man digital based job); and Seth Rogan's Animation Imaginatorium is a rip-off old-style Walt Disney-style trailer, introducing the movie.

4 / A
- Paul Blom

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