Sausage Party - Movie Review

Starring the voices of Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Edward Norton, Salma Hayek, Bill Hader, Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, David Krumholtz, Danny McBride, James Franco, Nick Kroll and Paul Rudd.
Written by Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg.
Directed by Greg Tiernan & Conrad Vernon.

★★★

Sausage Party is the raunchiest animated movie since South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. It's a spoof of VeggieTales and the Pixar canon that anthromorphizes everything from toys to cars. Beneath all the subversive humor is a direct attack on religion.

Seth Rogen voices a sausage named Frank who is in love with a bun named named Brenda (Kristen Wiig). They're packaged next to each other on a shelf in a grocery store called Shopwells. Each morning, all of the groceries join in a song that celebrates the Gods, aka the humans that shop there. It is the belief of the food that when they are selected by the Gods, they will go to Great Beyond, aka out the front door, where they will live in an eternity of joy and sexual fulfillment.

But when a jar of honey mustard (Danny McBride) is returned, he comes back with horrible tales. The Gods are monsters who plan to consume them. There is no happiness in the Great Beyond; there is only death.

Frank and Brenda escape their packaging and set out to find the truth, but the longer they search, the more doubtful Frank becomes, and the more fearful Brenda becomes that she is angering the Gods.

The movie is full of stereotypes and has fun with them. Frank and Brenda are joined by a Jewish bagel (Edward Norton) and a Arabic lavash (David Krumholtz), and they bicker about occupied aisle space. The lavash also dreams of being drenched in the Great Beyond in 77 bottles of virgin olive oil. The German sauerkraut screams about exterminating the juice. And so on.

The movie is filled to the brim with dirty jokes, many of which are funny. In fact, it's remarkable how freeing animation is for Rogen's pot-obsessed humor.

As for the atheist argument, let's just say Rogen does it in a funnier, less ham-fisted way than Ricky Gervais or Bill Maher are capable of. The movie winds up being a celebration of hedonism before it ultimately disappears up its own butt.