‘Sausage Party’ Trailer: Adult Animation Cooked to Perfection, or the ‘Wurst’ Movie of 2016?

Considering the primary target market for the genre, mainstream animation seldom bears any ground-breaking shock value. Only every once in a while does something alternative and daring draw in an audience, and even then its success is often marred by the stigma attached to animation; a stigma which unfortunately overlooks the genre as one that is accessible to more mature audiences. Seth Rogen’s Sausage Party (2016), while hardly making itself out to be anything uniquely ground-breaking, subverts this oft-enforced stigmatism by littering its feature with f-bombs and sex jokes galore, which is indeed a bold, if unoriginal, venture.

Sony Pictures Imageworks, 2016

As I’ve established previously, I wholeheartedly endorse the transference of the animated flick into adult territory, mostly because I’ve always felt as though the predominant alignment of animation with children’s entertainment to be somewhat contrived and narrow-minded. That said, this isn’t quite what I had in mind. Sausage Party, as evidenced by the uncensored trailer, is a crude and vulgar parody of animation as we know it; a subversive, almost twisted take on the standard Disney or Pixar formula. Which is fine – it’s clear that this is indeed what the movie sets out to achieve. Most notably we can identify a similarity to Pixar’s feature film debut Toy Story (1995), in the sense that the food yearns to be purchased by a human and loved, the difference being, of course, that the food undergoes an horrific maltreatment (from their perspective) which obviously results in their being peeled, cooked, boiled and ‘eaten alive’. The concept is funny, undoubtedly. However, it’s likely not going to be to everybody’s taste, so to speak.

Sony Pictures Imageworks, 2016

As with many other ‘adult’ animations, Sausage Party’s adult appeal is more so in its coarseness than in its themes. Sure, the idea of processed meat being, er, ‘slaughtered’ isn’t exactly what you’d consider child-friendly, but it would hardly constitute an R rating. Rather, what makes this movie adult, as one might gather from the trailer, is its strong language, sex and drug references. And don’t get me wrong, this is a fun, alternative approach to animated film, but it’s not one we haven’t seen before. The biggest appeal of the film is that such adult animations are infrequent, and offer subversive humour that no other medium can equal. It’s just such a shame that there’s no middle ground – a mature animated feature aimed at those who do not identify with the appeal of the vulgar.

Regardless, it’s refreshing to see adult animation continue to appeal to the masses, even if it is purely for its ironic crudity. Initial responses seem to be generally encouraging, and while it does run the risk of rehashing what we’ve already grown accustomed to with adult animation, it might prove effective in propelling the animated film to new ground in general. The trailer implies this is nothing revolutionary, but if lowbrow vulgarity helps to break the stigma, this movie could prove to be a real ‘wiener’.

Click to view the trailer below.

WARNING: Contains strong language and suggestive themes: