Summary
Sausage Party: Foodtopia has little to offer beyond banal shock tactics that’ll likely have you questioning how you spend your free time.
There are precisely two kinds of jokes in Sausage Party: Foodtopia. The first is food puns, and the second is the visual gag of various foodstuffs having sex with other foodstuffs.
I’ll concede I’m partial to a pun, so I laughed at the orange being named Julius, Tina Turnip, and Watermelon Gibson (who thinks only one type of food is responsible for all the world’s wars.) But the shock of the 2016 movie’s giant orgy sequence only worked that one time and Foodtopia doesn’t just try and recreate it right out of the gate, but constantly returns to the well for other gags and plot points. After a while – pretty quickly, actually – it starts to become a little weird.
Perhaps if I’d ingested as much medical marijuana as was clearly clouding the writer’s room of this project – Kyle Hunter, Ari Shaffir, Seth Rogen, and Evan Goldberg all return – I’d be more inclined to see the funny side. But I work from home, and sometimes when your girlfriend ambles in and asks why you’re watching anthropomorphic groceries have sex, you’re forced to ask some awkward questions about your life choices.
The market for this Prime Video follow-on is identical to the market for that original movie since it retains the exact same tone and humor, and indeed most of the cast and creative team, even if it ignores the movie’s ending to avoid having to take the premise in any new directions.
Instead of pursuing the more compelling swerve at the end of the movie, when the characters realized they were cartoons and traveled through a portal to confront their famous voice actors, Foodtopia instead follows the Shopwell supermarket foods as they venture into the big wide world and try to establish an Animal Farm-style independent utopia governed by themselves.
You’d think there was some potential in this new premise, and we see snippets of what might have been. There’s a rigged election, overreach of power, police brutality, sudden poverty, efforts at wealth redistribution, and the accidental invention of communism. It’s like Sausage Party: Foodtopia ate a better, smarter series, and then regurgitated in puddles between bouts of tedious excess.
There was clearly a desire – perhaps even a mandate – to keep raising the bar of what’s possible when it comes to extreme sex, violence, and sexual violence in animated form. And I must admit it’s intermittently impressive to see how far Foodtopia pushes things in this regard. I muttered a quiet “okay…” to myself more times than I expected, but then again I also asked, sometimes aloud, what I was watching more times than I bothered to count.
Between these moments is nothing beyond – funny, to be fair – food puns. There is nothing else here. The punning ranges from the names of characters, including an egg named Yoko, to exaggerated send-ups of other movies, shows, and songs, some of which are re-enacted. You don’t need me to tell you that as amusing as Yoko is as a name for an egg, it doesn’t provide any depth to the egg. This season is eight episodes long.
There are, of course, main characters – Frank the Frankfurter (Rogen), Brenda the hot dog bun (Kristen Wiig), and Barry the half-eaten hotdog (Michael Cera) are the leading trio again, with big-ish parts for Sammy the Bagel (Woody Allen by way of Edward Norton), who wants to become a local celebrity, and Julius (Sam Richardson), an orange who fancies himself the leader of this new food-based community.
But what do you do with characters in this kind of context? Even though they drive the action – and the vocal performances are fine – it still amounts to little more than the sex and violence you see everywhere else, just in slightly different contexts. As the season progresses many of the jokes, plot points, and most out-there weirdness involves Jack (Will Forte), the show’s only human character, who ranges from a captive to a source of exposition to a surprising love rival in what is easily the scene that’ll have you questioning your pastimes most intently.
There’s a chance I just don’t do enough drugs anymore, but I just didn’t care about any of it. I’m not particularly impressed by on-screen warnings about how graphic and extreme something is, since it’s not exactly hard to offend people these days, especially when the animation you’re using to do it is inferior to the original movie (which was released almost a decade ago).
I don’t doubt people will enjoy Sausage Party: Foodtopia, and fair play to them. There’s a part of me that wishes I did since it makes me feel old and stuffy that I didn’t, but that’s my cross to bear. But you’d have a hard time convincing me that there’s anything impressive about it beyond its capacity to make you feel a bit uncomfortable.
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