Seth Rogen’s Murderous, Orgy-Loving Talking Hot Dog Is Back for More ‘Sausage Party’
Sausage Party, a feature cartoon from frequent collaborators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, is an R-rated parody of Pixar that also doubles as a genuine creative riff on the beloved animation studio’s storytelling style. It features a secret world within our world (where talking food, rather than toys or bugs or psychological conditions, has its own grocery-store society), ruminates on a deeply human subject (in this case, belief systems, religious and otherwise), and traffics in a lot of situational puns (in addition to, and sometimes in conjunction with, the raunchy stuff). Maybe it’s only fitting that, like so many Pixar productions before it, Sausage Party has received a years-later follow-up that revives its predecessor’s cleverness while constantly threatening to wear it out.
Sausage Party: Foodtopia doesn’t exactly pick up from the very end of Sausage Party, which promised something more meta about the talking foodstuffs encountering the animators and voice actors who made them. Perhaps sensing this would be a dead end, the Prime Video series backs up to the climactic battle between foods and “humies” (humans), which quickly, if somewhat inexplicably, results in an apocalypse for the latter. With few people remaining and foods free to do as they please, hot dog Frank (Rogen), his bunly romantic partner Brenda (Kristen Wiig), runtier yet battle-hungry hot dog Barry (Michael Cera), and a mournful Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton), among others, must figure out how to navigate the world outside the confines of the now-crumbling grocery store.
Fresh off the success of their food revolution, Frank and Brenda are confident that they can forge their way through any significant challenges, whether it’s creating a social safety net, avoiding a marauding crow, or puzzling out how and why water sometimes mysteriously falls from the great big blue ceiling. It all proves much more complicated than they anticipate—especially when it comes to the presence of one of the last humies, voiced by Will Forte.
Let no one say that Rogen and Goldberg lack conceptual ambition—eventually. Foodtopia's first few episodes rehash a lot of the first film’s shock gags. And look, sex and violence can be very funny, as they occasionally are here. But the show’s fixation on wacky-looking cartoon characters having free-for-all orgies in between slapstick-killing humans and accidental food massacres quickly becomes schticky and repetitive, even as it pushes the grown-up animation envelope. (Later in the series, Forte has a scene so bonkers that you have to assume he was crestfallen to learn he wouldn’t be performing it in the flesh.)
Sausage Party: Foodtopia
Some of the show’s stoner-y thought experiments about a post-apocalyptic food-governed society, meanwhile, are funnier: food citizens discovering currency via the trading of human teeth, then attracting a power-hungry police force—led by Barry, with Cera giving an uncharacteristically aggressive yet still, somehow, Cera-y performance—and recreating human frailties like selfishness, greed, hunger for attention, and rancorous division.
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As ham-fisted as some of the social commentary is, Rogen and Goldberg know how to balance it out with pure silliness, like a parade of food-based musical acts like Megan Thee Scallion and Talking Breads. (The Werner Herzog parody is more belabored.) The show’s ultimate problem has more to do with portion control. Foodtopia is a continuous narrative broken into eight 20-minute episodes, which means it adds up to a 160-minute sequel to an 89-minute movie, rather than a companion piece that takes advantage of the new format. Has Rogen forgotten how his training as an actor and writer essentially began with the perfectly judged and relatively stand-alone episodes of Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared? It seems unlikely, considering he starred in another good (if more serialized) series, Platonic, just last year. Foodtopia feels more like the tail end of the IP streaming gold rush—a novelty expanding to fill the container it’s been given.
Hard-core fans of the Rogen/Goldberg house style (or aficionados of animated grotesquerie) will probably have a good time with Foodtopia, but more than a decade after the pair spun off from the Judd Apatow universe into their own endeavors, it’s worth asking whether they’ve started placing undue emphasis on branded raunch. Just as Finding Dory might have spurred warmer feelings toward the (currently, fingers crossed) unsequelized likes of Wall-E or Ratatouille, Sausage Party: Foodtopia may inspire nostalgia over Rogen/Goldberg productions like Superbad or This Is The End—concisely funny and character-based movies that weren’t allowed to run their premises, or their adults-only ratings, into the ground. The food citizenry of Sausage Party: Foodtopia spend a lot of time trying to get the big picture to work. They never get around to becoming individuals worthy of Rogen and Goldberg’s talent.
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