Sausage Party (2016) Review- By Michael J. Carlisle

Title: Sausage Party 
Year: 2016
Director: Greg Tiernan
Country: US
Language: English

Ah, imagine taking your child to see this picture only to have to explain the many sexual inneundos littered throughout Sausage Party's run-time. "Daddy, why does the hotdog want to jack rabbit into the bun?". Sexual insinuation and juvenile visual metaphor take hold of this Seth Rogan vehicle, but I promise you the film ends up being smarter -and more entertaining- than toilet/bedroom humour. 

The food in Sausage Party believe in “the gods” (human consumers) who select a chosen few from the shelves and escort them into “the Great Beyond”. A jar of honey mustard (Danny McBride) is returned from "the Great Beyond", traumatized from his experiences and tells our hero Frank (Seth Rogan as a weenie) about the "truth". Frank must investigate these claims for himself. 

Sausage Party dissects religion and belief systems far better than the vast majority of Hollywood Christian pictures that have come out lately (sorry War Room). Frank's crisis of faith is quite easy to relate to, and the screenwriter does a good job at not making this an "angry atheist" picture. It's view on conflict can be overly simplistic at times however; the weenie suggests the Jewish hotdog and the Muslim lavash, metaphors for the Israel/Palestine conflict, should solve their problems by just "getting along".  

Directed by Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan, Sausage Party’s animation by Nitrogen Studios is pretty good. It holds its own against the major animation studios like Dreamworks and Pixar, while being a vast improvement over Fox's animation. One would have a difficult time dismissing this film as purely visual innuendo, serving as juvenile humor. The picture lightly critiques the food industry, asking why we must incorporate race into our food. 

While I didn't find myself laughing too much during this "comedy", I did find myself in reflection and thought about the serious topics Sausage Party was presenting. Having a fairly short run-time (80 minutes) this film was pretty engaging. It was better than anybody thought it would be. Certainly one of the better productions to come out of 2016.