When we last left Sausage Party, the raunchy Pixar parody that promised to show a hotdog having sex with a bun, Frank and Brenda, the aforementioned sexually active hotdog and bun voiced by Seth Rogen and Kristen Wiig, had everything they ever wanted. And by that, we mean a Native American-branded liquor bottle named Firewater (Bill Hader) and a piece of ABC gum (Scott Diggs Underwood) discover that they’re cartoon characters in a movie. Firewater and Gum build a toilet-shaped StarGate that can send them to a different dimension to confront their puppet masters.
Yes, Sausage Party ends on a cliffhanger with anthropomorphic food heading into the real world, a thread the trailer for the long-awaited(?) eight-part sequel series only hints at. After showing some flashy, perhaps interdimensional effects over the Earth, the trailer picks up with the human world learning “food is alive,” something that anyone with a working understanding of where meat comes from already knows. In this dimension, the idea of food coming alive and shoving itself up the ass of a Shopwell’s customer is very scary. Unfortunately, the food wasn’t ready for the periodic release of water from the sky which has a destabilizing effect on buns and wicked witches alike. What cruel god withheld “sun’s out, bun’s out” from this poor bread product’s innate knowledge of the rules regarding going outside as a bun?
Sausage Party: Foodtopia is somehow an eight-episode miniseries eating whatever leftovers remain from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s better-than-it-should-be animated effort. However, always one to leave money on the table, rather than have people pay to see a 90-minute Foodtopia movie in a theater, Amazon is giving the show away on Prime Video. It’s easy to forget now, but Sausage Party was actually a pretty big hit, bringing in more than $140 million worldwide. It’s also easy to forget that directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan managed to keep production costs down by illegally overworking animators via what we called a “sausage sweatshop” at the time. They were also accused of not giving credit to more than 30 animators on the production. In 2019, the Canadian government ordered Nitrogen Studios, which by that time had been acquired by U.K. studio Cinesite, to fork over overdue overtime pay. Now, with Prime Video in charge of the ship, we’re confident all labor disputes will be handled through the proper channels. It’s not like Amazon has ever been accused of mistreating workers or something.
Sausage Party: Foodtopia streams on Prime Video on July 11.