The Critical Frog: Sausage Party

The poet Shel Silverstein once wrote in his short piece "Point of View" about a young man who realized the thankless aspects of food once he began to look at it from his meal's perspective. This can make one wonder what exactly it is your food sees before it enters the cavernous regions of your mouth. Sausage Party, the first R-Rated animated feature in over a decade, takes the time to show us, and the results are ABSOLUTELY HORRIFYING.

Sausage Party is so over-the-top in its sexualization, language and brutality to food that it's no wonder some critics have hailed it a hallmark of adult animation. But does it really pull it's weight, or is it the shock and reintroduction of R-rated animation that sparks such glowing reviews? It's a bit of both, actually.

Our star character is a sausage named Frank, who lives in a supermarket with his pack of hot dogs and has a mutual affection for Brenda the hot dog bun. They dream of being chosen together by the gods who prowl the supermarket aisles and whisked away to the Great Beyond, where supposedly nothing bad will ever happen to the food products at all. After a traumatic event wherein a pot of honey mustard commits suicide to avoid being sent back to the Great Beyond, Frank and Brenda are separated from their packages and shopping cart and must hurry to find their way back to packaging before the day the hot dogs and buns are chosen together for the Fourth of July. But Frank is tormented by the dead condiment's last words, and so goes on his own mission to discover the truth of the great beyond, while Brenda races back to her aisle while evading the nefarious feminine hygiene product that pursues her and Frank on a quest for vengeance. She's joined by a kosher bagel and a piece of Lavash bread that can't get along as well on a journey to return to their feuding aisles (guess what this is a metaphor for?). Meanwhile Frank's pack discovers the horror of what happens once they leave the store, and one little hot dog attempts to escape.

The film can be funny at times, but other scenes take the profanity and sexualized content too far. There's an admittedly thin line between too much and just enough, that very few shows can walk effectively (South Park, Bojack Horseman) that separates the good and the bad of adult animation. If South Park is a ten on the understanding scale and Family Guy is a negative twenty seven, than Sausage Party  would be roughly a six. There are quite a few moments where the profanity fits (such as when a sentient potato is peeled alive, or when a character has an epiphany), and the sexuality works to the film's advantage, but most times it ends up looking too overdone.

OVERALL RATING: 6/10