Sausage Party’s sequel makes a strong case that Seth Rogen needs more boundaries
Sausage Party: Foodtopia is an unlikely creative flex for writer-producer partners Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Creative freedom in Hollywood is almost always relative. But the ability to get paid for something like this sequel miniseries — for dedicating 160 minutes to the ongoing adventures of sexually overactive, sometimes murderous animated food — that has to sit pretty high on the power spectrum.
That’s something delightful about Rogen and Goldberg’s long-running success together: Approaching 20 years after their breakout Superbad, it truly feels like they’re still following their own weird muse. That muse led them to bring Superbad to the big screen after starting the writing process when they were literal teenagers, younger than the actual characters in the movie. It gave us the stoner action-comedy epic Pineapple Express. And it resulted in the gloriously weird, celeb-packed apocalypse in This Is The End, their joint directorial debut. “Seth and Evan really wanted this” is the only possible reason a movie like 2016’s Sausage Party exists: It’s hard to imagine any outside forces insisting that someone spend millions to computer-animate a raunchy parody of objects-come-to-life Pixar movies, which then pivots into a critique of both organized religion and smug atheism.
On the other hand, Sausage Party’s $100-million-plus success likely played a role in the existence of its supersized sequel. Prime Video’s eight-episode Sausage Party: Foodtopia miniseries continues the saga of sentient hot dog Frank (Seth Rogen), his bun girlfriend Brenda (Kristen Wiig), his smaller fellow hot dog Barry (Michael Cera), his neurotic pal Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton, still doing a Woody Allen impression), and various other former residents of the grocery store these foodstuffs escaped in Sausage Party.
Leaving behind their shelf life, and their fate of inevitable consumption by “humies” (humans), the food has brought about the apocalypse — for humies, anyway. For food, the
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