Sausage Party

Hey. Do you guys remember puppet comedian Jeff Dunham, whose downtrodden Mexican "on a steeeek" character José Jalapeño delighted many a middle-class white American in the '90s? Well, imagine he blazed up a joint with Bill Maher, wrote a manifesto on atheism and then made a multimillion-dollar animated feature film about the inner lives of grocery-store food with the admirable goal of offending as many people as possible. Then imagine that the characters and dialogue were as dull as unsalted saltines and things got real preachy. That's Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's Sausage Party.

Unbeknownst to humans, food is alive — alive, with a multitude of feelings (and extremely stereotypical accents). Frank (Rogen), a hot dog, and his girlfriend Brenda (Kristen Wiig), a bun, await that moment when a god (a human) will choose them for the Great Beyond (a customer's kitchen). Finally, they'll be able to come out of their packages, and meat will slip into bread. And across their store, other foods are embroiled in feuds and parties and battles for territory.

The premise is an easy allegory for religion and the world's problems; stop waiting for the gods to tell you what to do and just fucking do what you want. That's a perfect vehicle for comedy, so it's a shame the jokes are so on the nose. The Sauerkraut (co-director Conrad Vernon) is a Nazi and the Lavash (David Krumholtz) is a Jihadist, so mostly everyone's terrible, except for Frank, whose only fault is being "insensitive" in the manner of most Seth Rogen characters. However, there are three intensely hilarious and memorable scenes, and every person on this animation and editing team needs a raise.