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.
