Brow Beat

Seth Rogen’s Sausage Party Looks Like an R-Rated Toy Story if Andy Ate All the Toys

Sausage Party
Could Sausage Party do for R-rated computer-animated movies what Deadpool did for R-rated superhero movies?

Annapurna Pictures

The biggest movie story of 2016 has been the breakthrough success of Deadpool, which showed that a superhero movie could be a colossal success even with an R rating. Now Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the team behind Superbad, Pineapple Express, The Interview, and This Is the End (and, though they’d rather you forget it, The Watch), are trying to do the same thing for R-rated comedies with Sausage Party, which they’re billing as “the first R-rated CG animated movie.”

Like Deadpool, Sausage Party looks in many ways like a loose parody of its genre—the genre in this case being cute, Pixar-style family movies about anthropomorphized inanimate objects (think Toy Story, Cars, or The Brave Little Toaster). In this case, however, the cuddly inanimates get a rude awakening: Humans only create things in order to exploit and consume them.

It’s a pretty great conceit, and the trailer milks it, while also relying pretty heavily on the jarring effect of adorable animated characters screaming things like, “Oh Jesus F–k.” (As in the short films of Don Hertzfeldt, it’s funny to me, at least for a few minutes at a time.)

And, since it’s a Rogen-Goldberg joint, the cast includes all the funny people we’ve come to expect (James Franco, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Paul Rudd, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Bill Hader) and a couple we might not (Edward Norton, Salma Hayek). According to early reviews out of SXSW, it sounds like Sausage Party is more South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut or Team America than Hell and Back, and I’m excited to see what Rogen and Goldberg have cooked up on Aug. 12.