SAUSAGE PARTY Trailer
How many people were having flashbacks to the Toy Story series during this trailer? I mean, the supermarket was very reminiscent of Al’s Toy Barn, and the whole premise of giving inanimate objects complex emotional lives that humans eventually wreck is Toy Story as a whole. Except the things we do to our food is way more messed up than simple abandonment, so I guess Jessie doesn’t earn a sad song until Emily pulls a knife on her now.
The writers behind Sausage Party have explicitly stated that this is a riff on Pixar, a dirty, dirty riff on the seminal animation studio of our time. There’s also a lot of stuff going on about religion, and frankly, I’m not sure which group is more dangerous to take on: the deeply religious or the film community that essentially worships Pixar.
Sausage Party is brought to you by the comedy club that orbits around Seth Rogen, which means that nothing here is subtle (the boys are sausages and the girls are buns, get it?). The surprising member of the team here is co-director Greg Tiernan, who is most famous for his work on the Thomas & Friends series. Yeah, a guy who spent years directing stories about Thomas the Tank Engine is behind this raunch-fest, which had to be a weird change of pace.
Whether expletive-laced foodstuffs can sustain a feature film remains to be seen, but it does seem like they had the good sense to keep this venture short. The unfinished version that was shown at the South by Southwest Film Festival clocked in at under 90 minutes, so the animation at least took out the Apatow shagginess that creeps into so many of these guys’ films. I don’t think this project was something many people were clamoring for, but that’s probably because the premise never occurred to them in the first place. Despite the oddness, the names involved should guarantee a decent audience.
Sausage Party is directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon. It stars Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, and James Franco. It will be released in the U.S. on August 12th, 2016 and in the U.K. on September 2nd, 2016. For international release dates, click here.
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