SAUSAGE PARTY. Like Having a Beer with a Sleazy Acquaintance

In Sausage Party, every product in the Shopwell’s supermarket dreams of ending up in a customer’s shopping cart. Humans are gods to them — beings who allow them to pass through mystical doors leading to the longed-for paradise, a land of eternal happiness, freedom, and fulfillment. Food lined up on the shelves smiles and tries to attract attention; it wants to look perfect and be noticed. Of course, none of it realizes that what actually awaits is a swift and brutal death — a painful demise in boiling water, a microwave, on a scorching frying pan, or direct pulverization by the divine digestive system.

The main protagonist of Sausage Party is a sausage named Frank (voiced by Seth Rogen). We meet him as he and his companions, sealed in plastic packaging, scan the aisles for potential buyers. Next to the pack of sausages are the hot-dog buns, among them Frank’s beloved Brenda (dubbed by Kristen Wiig). They want to end up in the same cart and spend the rest of their lives together in the idyll beyond the sliding exit doors. However, Frank discovers the true and miserable purpose of their existence, and how illusory their ideas about the gods they adore really are. The sausage wants to spread this knowledge to everyone else and spark a collective rebellion, so that no human would ever dare to eat anything again.

Sausage Party is built on an original but risky idea. In the history of animated cinema, practically everything has already been brought to life and personified: toys, animals, plants, everyday objects, clouds, machines, cars, buildings, even emotions. In this case, the creators faced a particularly difficult task — not only giving these characters human traits, but also providing a meaningful motivation for their actions. Unfortunately, this is where the first problems with Sausage Party appear. On the one hand, the fear of being eaten seems bluntly simple, but on the other, there is no alternative drive that could propel these characters. While watching the film, I constantly feel like I’m stuck in a dead end. It’s an innovative narrative concept, but very hard to extract anything substantial from it.

In the animation by Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan, much like in Toy Story (one can certainly find several analogies between Sausage Party and the Pixar film, although they involve significant shifts in values), everything revolves around the relationship between the main characters and humans. I don’t know, however, what the ultimate goal of all this is — where the filmmakers are heading, what they are trying to convince me of. Sausage Party is neither a hymn to vegetarianism nor an encouragement to eat meat. It is also not a mockery of gluttony or deranged consumerism.

This is ideologically empty cinema: a barely engaging story, a bold idea reduced to a not particularly inspiring question for the viewer — “what if your slice of bread had a personality?” It feels like material suitable at best for a short film.

The directors of Sausage Party don’t really manage to make me like these characters or root for them. The vulgar language pouring from their mouths is supposed to impress me, to make me think they’re cool. It doesn’t work. On top of that, the incessant sexual innuendos, crude jokes, and double entendres eventually become tiresome. This is essentially the only plane from which Vernon and Tiernan generate humor — whether in dialogue or imagery. Watching Sausage Party feels like having a beer with a sleazy acquaintance who only knows R-rated jokes — and not only the ones with good punchlines. After a while, only one side is having fun. That is never enough to sustain a conversation.

The film jumps through several genre conventions, fulfilling the markers of postmodern cinema, but it brings little pleasure. It isn’t very creative and feels like it’s done on autopilot. The only memorable moment is a funny war-movie parody sequence, where the filmmakers actually manage to pack in a number of interesting, metaphorical images. But when they quote Terminator 2: Judgment Day, they fall into a cliché — a completely exhausted and no longer funny scheme. It’s a very uneven production.

Sausage Party was loudly advertised as an animation for adults. But that is a very broad term. In this case, the age restriction is applied in a crude way — through a sea of profanity and erotica — for reasons that are unclear in a world of grocery products. A colossal qualitative gap separates cinema for adults from cinema about adults.