Clip It: Each day, Jon Davis looks at the world of trailers, featurettes and clips and puts it all in perspective.
I'm never going to look at potatoes the same way. I know I'm a little late to this Sausage Party, but I wasn't quite prepared for how dark this trailer was going to be. It's creepier than most horror trailers because it starts in such a genuinely innocent place. I mean, we're talking an animated movie about anthropomorphic groceries. I knew this was adult themed. The title Sausage Party gives that away, even if you didn't read any press about this film. But the cruel nature of what we humans do to food by eating it, that threw me.
When I was a kid, I remember stepping on an ant hill, then suddenly picturing families of ants dying in tragedy and that was enough to avoid doing that again. It's not clear ants have feelings. Do groceries? Not anymore. But many groceries were once farm animals. So it's not that much of a stretch to see a potato skinned alive and think “wow, that's screwed up.” I've skinned potatoes! It's all very Hitchcock, making us, the audience, complicit in the murder, especially cause in this case, all of us have done it.
I laughed during this trailer. I have to give Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg credit for always doing new, weird stuff. Even when it doesn't work, it's interesting. They're trying something different. And I love that they can convince people to give them money to try something different. It seems like whenever they hit upon an idea that Hollywood would, under normal circumstances, never finance, that's the idea they want to do. I really appreciate that kind of thinking, even if it means I don't want to eat anymore.