![]() There is a surprising attention to detail in Sausage Party, with a great deal of attention paid to the workings of its internal logic. Indeed, even more than its sophomoric vulgarity, it is this rigorous application of logic that defines Sausage Party. However, there is also a sense of comfort and insulation in these family-friendly films, treating humans as monsters and never dwelling too rigorously upon the logic of the situation. Chicken Run comes to mid, as does The Fantastic Mister Fox. To be fair, there have been animated family films that have touched upon this idea in the past, most obviously those willing to cast humans as antagonists to anthroporphised animals. What if we imagined food to be a living thing with personality and identity? How would food react to being displayed and sold? How would food respond to the revelation that it exists to be eaten? It is a very dark joke, one that wonders what might happen if the Beast were to accidentally drop Misses Potts or what would occur if Nemo ever caught a glimpse of the inside of a sushi bar. That is in many respects the core gag of Sausage Party, which follows that train of thought to its logical conclusion. There is a fascinating dissonance there if our imaginations are capable of conceiving as food and products as entities, what does that say about us? How many parents served up fish fingers to children who loved Finding Dory? What must children make of broken toys after investing them with humanity in Toy Story? Turbo earned over two million euro at the French box office, while escargot remains a delicacy. After all, for all that we imbue these inanimate objects with charming personality, there is a limit to our empathy. Of course, there is a black comedy in all of this. Cute things become cuter if they can pretend to be people. It’s a nice approach for family entertainment. Now it seems to come as standard Turbo anthropomorphises snails, Finding Nemo anthropormorphises fish, Trolls will anthropomorphise those long-haired nineties toy creatures. Before computer-generated imagery could convincingly replicated human hair and skill, it was more practical to imaging living toy. ![]() In recent years, computer-generated animation has made it even easier to push familiar objects into the uncanny valley. Indeed, the character designs in Sausage Party pay tribute to a much older example, borrowing Mickey Mouse’s white gloves and booted feet. However, there are countless classic other such stories and characters. Given the computer-generated animation and the premise, Toy Story is the most obvious point of comparison. What if that food were anthropormorphised? What if it existed in a world where it interacted with other foods? In many ways, this is a riff on a classic children’s film motif. “What if food were alive?” is a fairly standard premise. Sausage Party is one extended gag, but it is just about funny enough to pull it off. While the movie can occasionally feel a little indulgent and meandering, that charm carries it a long way. Sausage Party works remarkably well given that it is essentially one very clever joke spread across ninety minutes, padded out with healthy doses of absurdity and puns. In some ways, Sausage Party feels like it had a similar genesis, beginning with a goofy joke among friends that escalated and evolved into a surprisingly fleshed-out and developed world. A wisened old liquor bottle explains that this whole plan was the result of a massive stoner session. These old and experience foodstuffs recall how they carefully cultivated and curated the mythology of the supermarket, building a religion that treated consumers as “gods” and which encouraged the store’s food and drink to dream of being “chosen.” There is even a hymn that the food sings every morning. At one point in Sausage Party, the heroic hotdog Frank encounters a group of ancient foodstuffs hiding out in the liquor aisle of the shopping market that he calls home.
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