Sausage Party Review: Substance Under Cooked

Walking into Sausage Party (2016) yesterday afternoon with my friend Christian, I wasn't expecting too much. Having enjoyed the meta outing that was This is The End (2013) I had little doubt that Seth Rogen would fail to entertain me in his first adult-animated adventure. Christian and I were the only two people in the auditorium for this screening, which allowed me to entertain the self-delusion that this was a private screening held for expert critics and movie buffs such as myself. I was glad we were the only two in the general vicinity because it allowed our reaction's to the events on the screen to be amplified, and boy were there some reactions. It's one thing to watch animated food get viciously murdered and consumed by dim and dowdy human folk, but it's another thing to watch food fornicate on screen and sing songs about praising a higher power that desires to maim and eat you for dinner. The most surprising thing about Sausage Party for me, however, was not the amount of visual or audible obscenities displayed, but the serious allegories beneath them. The film makes allusions to religion, atheism, political turmoil, racial profiling and even manages to represent the LGBT community without being overtly offensive. I actually sympathized with Teresa the Taco and her forbidden love, though the Twinkie character was pushing it, then again, what wasn't? A movie like this must push buttons, or else why even bother paying the animators to take on such an ambitious venture in the first place? Sausage Party is a spectacle, but at least it is a spectacle that is attempting to say something. We shouldn't believe something just because we are told by our elders and "superiors" that it is true. Sometimes, we must go on our own journey of self-discovery to decide what the truth really is, and what to do with that information once we possess it. For the food in the film, they choose to fight back against the humans, quite graphically I might add, but not without laughs nonetheless. It leaves the door open for future films in the franchise of course, which I'd like to see on the condition that they follow in Sausage Party's footsteps, not just in terms of comedy, but also in substance. No metaphor or potential symbolic representation should go unturned. These are, after all, animated movies for adults. Please give us the Easter eggs and allow us to go on the hunt for them. Rogen, much like Matt Stone and Trey Parker, understands that a joke is nothing without the punch behind it. Sausage Party won't likely win any accolades, but don't dismiss it as smut too quickly. This smut has something to say.