Ultimately, Sausage Party lines up with the increasingly secular mainstream on this matter, opining (in my view mistakenly) that religion is a misinterpretation of the natural world caused by a lack of knowledge and an unwillingness to question what has traditionally been regarded as true. But it is interesting to find a mainstream comedy (and a stoner comedy at that) wanting to tackle this issue, instead of merely spouting platitudes about it through a haze of illegal chemicals. Obviously you're not going to find the deepest examination of religion or theology in here - any film which literally climaxes in a mass orgy hasn't got the deepest of convictions. The film has an interest in the way that religions operate, both in terms of their relationship to other religions and the relationship between gods and their followers. This film shares Lasseter's idea of purpose being something external (something given to creatures, rather than something that they invent for themselves), but those giving said purpose are far less benevolent. John Lasseter once said that he tried to characterise inanimate or disposable objects in terms of their relationship to their purpose in his example, a bottle of water would be very happy when full, would get mad at people the more they drank from it, and would cease to feel meaning toward its life once it was empty. As we shall see, Sausage Party is interested in religion quite a bit - albeit not from the most academic of perspectives.Įqually, we can view Sausage Party's conceit as a parody of the Disney-PIXAR approach to character animation.
The film's philosophical underpinning is animism, the idea of animals, plants and even inanimate objects having souls - a belief which, some anthropologists claim, is one of the oldest in human civilisation and the underpinning of many early religions.
The idea sounds simple - it's the sort of thing that a child could imagine, given the right stimulation - but it is also one of surprising depth. The film has an interesting central conceit - namely what it would be like if our food had feelings, and how it would react to being eaten. Even if we don't like the finished product, the fact that a film this spirited and personal was made at all under the present system is something which should be applauded.
Sausage fest 2017 skin#
This is wearing the skin of a mainstream film, but underneath it is a labour of love. Not only that, but this film cost $19m, much lower than the kind of budget which mainstream animation efforts often enjoy.
Seth Rogen worked for eight years to make the film, being turned down by numerous studios and first teasing the project in 2010, three years before it was green-lit. Sausage Party is a high-concept film, insofar as it is built around one central idea, but it is not entirely high-concept in its execution. If nothing else, it's further evidence that lowbrow productions can often be as successful as ultra-highbrow outings in making us both think and laugh. Like National Lampoon's Animal House before it, it takes a subject matter which has potentially interesting political or philosophical connotations, and proceeds to explore it in some of the most delightfully tasteless ways imaginable for a contemporary audience - and all the while you find your sides splitting like one of its bananas. Not every comedy has to be as substantial as Stanley Kubrick's outings in the genre, but a comedy which does the hard work is always a welcome addition - particularly during awards season, in which comedies are so often overlooked in favour of more overtly serious but often inferior films.īy these standards, or indeed any standards, Sausage Party is a great comedy. I do not mean that the best comedy is one that will not produce laughter, but rather that a great comedy will often be able to make you think or deeply emote, feeding your head and your heart even as it makes your sides ache. There is value to be found in taking a comedy seriously.
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