These lewd, crude, and rude jokes are paired perfectly with Sausage Party’s animation. The film is CGI animated with bright colors and the CGI looks great. It's clean, fluid animation that’s pleasant to watch. If you didn’t know any better you might think it was a children’s film at first glance. The anthropomorphic food items mostly have big, adorable eyes, gloved hands, and cute little shoes on their feet. However, the film appropriately changes its lighting and colors when darker aspects of the film are revealed, presenting new hues with these shifts in tone. The last fifteen to twenty minutes of this film are, no pun intended, balls-to-the-wall outrageous. Some of the most shocking acts in animation ever put into wide release (in the U.S., anyway) happen during this span, and it is glorious. It absolutely makes you wonder how they got away with it. If you’re curious Rogen lays out what the MPAA made them cut in a Howard Stern interview (Link- mild spoilers after the jump).

It would be remiss of me, in light of all the praise I’ve heaped upon the film, not to mention the controversy behind the film’s success. It’s also worth noting, that the film’s writers and stars, Seth Rogen, Michael Cera, Evan Goldberg etc., did not have anything to do with the controversy. The issue I’m referring to stems from the treatment of the animators by Canadian animation studio, Nitrogen Studios. Studio head, Greg Tiernan, said in an interview with Cartoonbrew.com that:

“...We knew damn well that we could deliver a movie that looks like a $150 million movie for a fraction of the cost. That’s about as close as I can get to confirming or denying that figure. In general, that’s the whole reason we started the studio 13 years ago. After working in the L.A. industry for many years, I could see so much money just needlessly thrown down the toilet in making a lot of these movies. It doesn’t have to cost that much money when you’re well organized, and you have your mind set on the goal of what you want to do, and you get the job done with a small, determined crew. But yeah, let’s just say it was a lower budget movie.[Amidi]