Animated films for adults are an inherently tricky proposition, and so very few of them ever get made. In fact, only South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut and Team America: World Police really come to mind, though the Ralph Bakshi films did find success way back in the ’70s. Still, the small-screen success of Family Guy, Futurama, South Park and Archer has proven that there is some appetite for witty, raunchy animation. So that’s why there’s hope for Sausage Party, Seth Rogen’s animated raunchfest, which has been building a pretty stellar voice cast and sounds, ahem, intriguing.
Paul Rudd and Danny McBride just hopped on board the project, which also includes the voices of Rogen, Jonah Hill, Kristen Wiig, Salma Hayek, Edward Norton, David Krumholtz, Nick Kroll, Michael Cera, James Franco, Craig Robinson, Bill Hader and Anders Holm. I haven’t seen such a jaw-dropping line-up of comedians since Rogen’s last venture, summer smash This is the End.
Annapurna Pictures is still taking a pretty big risk with Sausage Party, but the talent involved is unmistakable. As you might expect from such outrageous presences as Rogen, Franco, Hill and Robinson, the plot for Sausage Party is totally nuts. It centers on a sausage named Frank (Rogen) who falls out of a shopping cart and begins to ask questions about his own existence. Enlisting the help of other food items, the heroic sausage embarks on a quest through the store aisles to get back to his place before the 4th of July sale.
We’ve also learned that Hill, Cera and Holm voice Frank’s sausage buddies, who believes that, in the “great beyond,” they will get to have sex with the buns across the aisle (Wiig voices a bun). In other funny news about this movie, Rogen gave details about what to expect while on The Howard Stern Show recently:
“We thought it would be funny to do an R-rated Pixar-style movie,” said Rogen. “Its fucking filthy. its really really really dirty, but it looks like a Pixar movie.”
As for the plot:
“It’s about food in a grocery store that believes when you get purchased all your wildest dreams come true. They don’t realize that you get eaten. And its about them slowly realizing what happens in their after life. It’s kind of like Toy Story, its a journey — they’re trying to get from one end of the store to the other,” said Rogen. ”It’s fucking crazy, its nuts.”
Like This is the End, Sausage Party will dabble in religious areas:
“Its subject matter inherently has to do with religion, so conceptually its somewhat R-rated.”
Even Sacha Baron Cohen was offended by Sausage Party, Rogen brags:
“Sausage Party appalled him [Sacha Baron Cohen] in some ways. We brought him to a screening where we watched the hand drawn version of the movie and he could not believe it — ‘that is the single craziest fucking thing I’ve seen in my whole life’ He said, ‘Just know you’ve gotten successful enough to make the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.’”
Of course, because this is Rogen, nothing’s off limits. Interested in seeing a food orgy? Sausage Party has got you covered:
There’s violence, it gets very sexual… there is a food orgy in the movie — one of the most filthy things I’ve ever seen in my life… We even explore inter-food sex in the movie, we explore all of that.”
It should be pretty hilarious, and the huge success of This is the End gives this film a strong likelihood of box office success. How well audiences respond to genuinely funny R-rated comedies was underscored recently by the success of Neighbors – though, as the dismal performance of A Million Ways to Die in the West has shown, success for button-pushing comedies is far from assured. With the cast Rogen has lined up, though, Sausage Party looks like a hit in the making.
The film opens June 3rd, 2016.