Film
Sausage Party. A film with a who’s-who cast list voicing the various characters, with the likes of Seth Rogen (The Night Before), Kristen Wiig (The Martian), Jonah Hill (War Dogs), Bill Hader (Inside Out), Michael Cera, James Franco (Oz The Great And Powerful), Danny McBride (The Angry Birds Movie), Craig Robinson (Hot Tub Time Machine 2), Paul Rudd (Ant-Man), Nick Kroll, David Krumholtz, Edward Norton and Salma Hayek (Everly). With such a list, one would expect something that is amazing. Sadly, Sausage Party is not. It’s aimed squarely at those who have yet to grow past a very juvenile sense of humour, presenting an animated story that embodies the literal sense of the phrase “food porn”. The story and jokes are dirty, the whole plot is about a quest for sex, with a slight foray into seeking the meaning of life and one’s own existence.
The plot of Sausage Party is meant to be about a sausage that strives to discover the truth about his existence, and what actually lies beyond the great big doors of the store in which all the foods live. While the film does hold true to this tale, it does get sidetracked, trying to raise the stakes on shock sexual reference in every scene.
Movie aficionados will be delighted to spot several references to great film moment, with a particular incident evoking images akin to Saving Private Ryan. However, these offer merely a brief respite from the dirty jokes, and strained intellectual questions of the story.
Sausage Party has an audience, and they are bound to thoroughly enjoy it. For the rest, they’d be better off finding a film more to their taste. Be warned, the film is graphic, and therefor it is suitable for adults only.
Disc
Technically, the disc is decent over-all. It’s just a pity the main feature is not really worth the time, unless you fall into a group whose humour remains in the realm of juvenile.
Sausage Party is available now, to purchase on disc, in South Africa.
Video
Video is encoded at a high average bitrate, with no visible artefacts. Colour are vibrant, with not colour bleed. Detail is maintained in the darker scenes.
VIewers with the necessary hardware or software are able to scale up to a larger or higher resolution screen, should they wish.
Audio
Audio is encoded at a high average bitrate. Dialogue is clear via the centre speaker, with ample use of the surrounds in the more action oriented scenes.
Navigation
Navigation is simple, and easy to use, with a static background image, and accompanying music. Viewers are presented with sub-menus for language choice, scene selection and special features.
The scene selection sub-menu contains four large, static colour thumbnails, with numbers. The large, colourful preview of each gives a decent enough idea of where you will navigate to, in the main feature.
The special features sub-menu presents plain text links to each featurette.
Bonus Features
The Booth – A look behind the scenes at the table read of the script, and how things progressed for the story, and the recording booth for each voice artist, giving some insight in to the process of creating the mood, emotion and voice they used.
The Great Beyond – Taking a look at the music of the film, viewers are treated to a look at the melody and song of Sausage Party.
The Pitch – An interview with Seth Rogen and colleagues, talking about his start in film, and how to pitch a film idea, getting your idea across to the relevant parties.
Seth Rogen’s Animation Imaginatorium – Seth Rogen in character and a setting of years gone-by, presenting Sausage Party.
Trailers – Ghostbusters, The Brothers Grimsby and The Night Before. These can be fast-forwarded, but not skipped individually. These can be accessed again via the special features sub-menu.
1 comment
Comments are closed.