Sausage Party is a movie that should not work. It is a 3D computer-animated film, the first in the United States and Canada to earn an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, and it is about groceries who believe humans are gods. It opened on August 12, 2016, through Sony Pictures Releasing under the Columbia Pictures label, and it made $141 million against a $19 million budget. That is a real return. The question is whether the joke underneath it holds up.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
A Sausage Named Frank
The setup is simple and good. A supermarket called Shopwell’s is full of food that talks, walks and worships. The groceries believe that when a human shopper picks them, they go to a utopia called the “Great Beyond.” Frank, a sausage voiced by Seth Rogen, wants to get there with his girlfriend Brenda, a hot dog bun voiced by Kristen Wiig. That is the whole engine. It is a religious parable told through a grocery cart, and for a while the film commits to it.
Then a returned jar of honey mustard comes back to the store and tries to tell everyone the truth. The Great Beyond is a lie. Nobody listens except Frank. Honey Mustard kills himself, and the suicide causes a cart collision that drops Frank, Brenda and several others out of the cart. Among them are Sammy Bagel Jr., a Jewish bagel voiced by Edward Norton, Kareem Abdul Lavash, an Arab lavash voiced by David Krumholtz, and an aggressive douche voiced by Nick Kroll. The douche wants revenge on Frank and Brenda because his nozzle got bent in the fall.
Firewater in the Liquor Aisle
Frank goes looking for proof. He leads Brenda, Sammy and Lavash to the liquor aisle, where he meets Firewater, voiced by Bill Hader, and the Non-Perishables. That group includes Mr. Grits, a box of hominy grits voiced by Craig Robinson, and Twink, a Twinkie. They admit they invented the Great Beyond. It was a noble lie, they say, meant to calm the groceries’ fear of being eaten. It did not stay noble. The aisles took the original revelation and split it into competing belief systems built on their own prejudices.
That is the sharpest idea in the film, and it is the one the movie mostly trusts. Firewater warns Frank that nobody will believe him. Frank vows to reveal the truth anyway and is told to travel past the store’s freezer section to find proof. The freezer is where the film’s theology gets its teeth. Everything the groceries have built their lives around turns out to be a story told to keep them calm on the way to the plate.
Seth Rogen and Kristen Wiig Play It Straight
The voice cast is deeper than the premise needs. Rogen plays Frank, Sergeant Pepper and Peanut Butter. Hill plays Carl. Hader plays Firewater, Tequila and El Guaco. Michael Cera plays Barry. James Franco plays Druggie. Danny McBride plays Honey Mustard. Paul Rudd plays Darren. Salma Hayek is also in the film. The list matters because the performances are not the problem.
Rogen and Wiig sell the romance without winking at it. Norton and Krumholtz play their religious and ethnic rivalry with a straight face, which is the only way the bit lands. Kroll’s douche is a one-note gag, but it is a loud one. The film’s tagline, “Get your fill,” tells you what kind of movie this is. It is not hiding.
What Nitrogen Studios Built
The animation was handled by the Vancouver-based Nitrogen Studios, and it looks like a movie that cost $19 million. That is not a knock. It is a description. The surfaces are clean, the colors are bright and the film deliberately mimics the visual language of the family-friendly animated features it is mocking. That choice is the whole point. If Sausage Party looked weird, the joke would be obvious. It looks normal, and that is what makes it work.
Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan directed. For Tiernan, it was his feature-length directorial debut. The screenplay is credited to Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. The film runs 89 minutes, and that is close to the right length. It does not have time to wear out its premise, though it comes near the end.
The Sequel That Changes the Ending
Sausage Party: Foodtopia, a sequel television series, arrived in 2024. That is worth noting because it changes how the original reads. A film that ends on a revelation about belief and consumption now has a continuation, and continuations tend to soften endings. The 2016 movie stands on its own, but it no longer stands alone. Whether that is good for the brand is a business question. Whether it is good for the film is a different one.
Where the Movie Slips
The first act is the strongest. The groceries singing about the Great Beyond, the horror of the return, Honey Mustard’s warning and his suicide — that run is genuinely unsettling, and it earns the R rating honestly. The film is an adult animated black comedy, and it does not pretend otherwise. It is also the first 3D computer-animated film in both the United States and Canada to get that R, which is a fact about the industry as much as about the movie.
The middle sags. Once Frank reaches the liquor aisle and gets the exposition, the film has to keep moving, and it does, but the momentum is carried by jokes rather than by the story. The freezer section recovers it. The final act is where the film decides what it is actually about, and the answer is less interesting than the setup promised.
The Belief Systems Are the Point
The best thing Sausage Party does is take religion seriously enough to make fun of it properly. The Non-Perishables did not set out to build a church. They set out to keep their friends from panicking. The lie escaped them. The aisles turned it into doctrine, then into rivalry, then into something closer to war. Sammy and Lavash hate each other because their aisles taught them to. That is a real observation about how belief works, and the film does not soften it.
It also does not do much with it. The movie raises the idea and then reaches for a gag. That is the pattern throughout. Sausage Party is smart enough to see the thing and not disciplined enough to sit with it. The result is a film that is more interesting to think about afterward than it is to watch in the moment.
The Verdict on Sausage Party
Sausage Party is a real accomplishment in one narrow sense: it proved that an R-rated 3D animated film could make money, and $141 million against $19 million is not a fluke. It also proved that the format can carry a joke that would never survive in live action. That is worth something.
But the film’s best idea — that the Great Beyond is a lie told by people who meant well and lost control of it — gets less screen time than the shock gags. The cast is better than the script. The animation is serviceable rather than striking. And the 89-minute runtime means the film never has to solve the problems it raises; it just runs out of time.
It is a good first act, a shaky middle and a finale that settles for the easy laugh. That is a 6.6 of 10.
The Hard Numbers
- Title: Sausage Party (2016)
- Directors: Conrad Vernon, Greg Tiernan
- Writers: Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg
- Runtime: 89 minutes
- Budget: $19 million
- Gross: $141 million
- Release date: August 12, 2016
- Distributor: Sony Pictures Releasing (Columbia Pictures)
- Rating: R (first 3D computer-animated film in the U.S. and Canada to receive it)
- Score: 6.6 of 10
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