“Sausage Party: Foodtopia” Review

The sequel series to Sausage Party is more of the crude and childish subversion that audiences were treated to with the 2016 film. There are plenty more acts of food fucking, cursing, and delivering puns so awful even grade school kids wouldn’t use them. That said, there’s a firmer focus within this extended tale to explore a more compelling political narrative. There is no subtext for this show’s intent. Anti-capitalism and socialism are the text.

Soon after the fall of mankind, the sentient food characters have taken over the Earth. The leaders of the hot dog, Frank (Seth Rogen), and the bun, Brenda (Kristen Wiig), believe they’ve created a utopia. But peacetime doesn’t exactly suit the longing for attention desired by the bold hot dog Barry (Michael Cera) and the grief-stricken bagel Sammy (Edward Norton). The peace is disrupted when the non-human elements of weather and wildlife threaten the various foods. With the supermarket destroyed, the food populace becomes greedy to acquire safe havens for their preservation. Thus, human teeth become a currency, and capitalism’s rot becomes as noticeable as the decaying produce.

There is no missing message with a show this blunt, especially for the villain being an orange named Julius (Sam Richardson), played up as a cross between Ceaser and Trump. His appeal to greed takes over, to the point where Frank and Brenda’s more reasonable proposal of wealth distribution is shot down for the foods who already got there’s and won’t let go. With this new governance and appeal to greed seeming strange, Frank seeks out the help of the last remaining human, Jack (Will Forte). Despite Jack being a failure fratboy, even he can understand what’s going on here, going so far as to highlight that the specific capitalism being satirized here is akin to Western developments.

The political messaging becomes more enduring as the show goes on, but that’s only because everything else sucks. The food sex, in which orange buttholes are licked and swiss cheese has pickles forced through the holes, grows as tiresome here as it does in the movie. That load gets shot early with the first episode’s orgy and never really stuns beyond a human/hot dog sex scene with a sperm-spewing punchline. The puns keep coming as well and they never really impress with their cleverness, featuring such lukewarm references as Megan The Scallion. They also come in musical form with new lyrics for classic rock songs that would be funny if they found something more than reworking the words to explain what is appearing on the screen. The voice work is also very limited considering the actors’ limited range. There’s a regular parody present of Werner Herzog in the form of Viener Herzog, performed by Edward Norton with what is easily one of the worst Herzog impressions I have ever heard. It doesn’t help that much of Viener’s dialogue is narration and it sounds exactly like Norton’s Sammy character, presenting confusion.

The animation is…fine. Bardel Entertainment does a solid job of maintaining the expressing nature from the movie, and it doesn’t feel like much of a downgrade, if any. There’s some decent staging of Foodtopia’s layout and the character designs rarely feel as rigid as the one-note jokes most of them are assembled for. And, yes, if you were hoping for more food getting gored, there’s plenty of violence to go around. But, much like the sex, there’s a numbness that takes hold by the final episode, where I felt boredom at the visual of a sentient baguette getting snapped in half as it cries out in pain. Moments like that seemed lesser in the face of how Julius uses his wealth to manipulate the justice system and media with a highly vocal message about the grim features of capitalism.

Foodtopia finds more to explore with Sausage Party, but still tastes off for its basic-bitch adult animation hook. I felt a little more for the characters, but only when they were coming to tougher truths of societal governance and less so when they are mutilated or fornicated. I suppose the good news is that the lingering teen/adult fans of this type of subversion may get a decent lesson in how much capitalism sucks, delivered in a manner that even the most oblivious viewer cannot miss. The problem is that Sausage Party is in a different camp from movie to show. Adult animation has been making greater strides on streaming that Foodtopia’s promises of edginess look timid by comparison. And for as much as I dug the direction for highlighting the hellish landscape of a money-based economy, the ultimate resolve favored more of the absurd than the astute. It comes to touching on something deeper that no other animated show does, but only dips its toes before splashing back to its safe zone of food puns and crude comedy that has aged like milk.