Using my Laughs, tears, cheese and cheers rating system, here is my spoiler-free review for the R-rated animation ‘Sausage Party’, with links below if you want to find out more.

Quick Summary

Taken at its best, ‘Sausage Party’ is a well-conceived and realised spoof of the family-friendly Pixar/Disney animations built around an anthropomorphic premise. Taken at its worst, ‘Sausage Party’ is just puerile nonsense. For me, it wavers more towards the latter, but I guess that parents who are on their 100^th viewing of ‘Cars’, or similar, might have found the pure effrontery of the idea a welcome change in their routine.

Laughs: 2/5

There are only so many times you can get a shock-laugh from cutesy animated food saying ‘F-you’ and ‘we’re f-d’. I would have found it funnier if not all the characters dropped f and c bombs at every opportunity, and instead, it felt like a Pixar film had been infiltrated rather than totally replaced by Seth Rogan and his mates swearing into a microphone while some stuff happens on screen.

The problem for me is that the Pixar films this is sending up are funny, generally, for kids and adults, and in a much more subtle and clever way. Therefore, why spoof them if you’re not going to be funnier? I did still chortle a bit though in the first half an hour of the film when I was seeing these audacious things for the first time, but it soon got repetitive.

Tears: 0/5

Not at all! It’s hard to give a f about f-ing food that f-ing swears all the f-ing time and thinks it’s so f-ing funny.

Cheese: 0/-5

The cheese category is very apt for this film, but as a ‘spoof’ it is almost immune to being accused of fake sentiment, as that is exactly what it is trying to send up.

Cheers: 1/5

Animated movies take a lot of hard work, and some of the action sequences were impressive and a credit to the team that produced them. At times, the things going on visually were weird and wonderful enough to distract from the mostly infantile script.

Fears: 0/5

Nothing to report on the ‘fears’ front.

 

Bonus Category:  Food Fight -3

Allegedly, many animators who worked on this movie were refused overtime pay and many who left as a result went uncredited, despite having worked on the film. That’s a shitty thing to do, if true, and if not I will adjust this modifier later on. However, I would still mark it down at least -1 for over-reliance on shock over content from the script writers.

Total: 0

(Check the Leader Board to see how it compares…)

Links:

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sausage_Party

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1700841/

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