Comic-Con 2016: Seth Rogen on staging an animated food orgy in ‘Sausage Party’

Someone could probably make an adorable, family-friendly animated movie about talking food in a grocery store. But Seth Rogen is clearly not that someone.

At an early screening for the upcoming “Sausage Party� at Comic-Con on Thursday night, Rogen and his longtime collaborator Evan Goldberg told the crowd that the film is the fulfillment of a long-held dream to make a raunchy, envelope-pushing, R-rated version of a Pixar-style movie.

“It was really born of wanting to do our own version of a big, CG-animated movie and to really follow the structure and the tropes of those movies we love like ‘Toy Story’ and ‘Cars’ and ‘A Bug’s Life,’ � Rogen said.

Set mainly in a supermarket, where the food believes humans to be gods who will bring them to a kind of beautiful Valhalla outside of the store, “Sausage Party� is a nonstop parade of jokes far too demented and filthy to describe here.

“We’d be walking around supermarkets with a notepad, stoned, at 2 in the morning, going, ‘Hey, horseradish could be a horse!’ � Rogen said, describing the writing process. “Eight years of that and you have a movie at the end.�

As an earlier audience had at South by Southwest when the movie screened there, the Comic-Con crowd ate it up (sorry) – particularly a climactic Caligula-style orgy involving an array of food items.

That scene was one of the first things that Rogen and Goldberg, who co-wrote the script with Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir, conceived. “I think the day after we knew we wanted to make a movie about food, we knew the food had to …. each other at some point,� Rogen said, letting out his distinctive, rumbling huh-huh-huh chuckle.

“That’s where you’ve got to give it to the animators,� he continued. “Animators are sick people. A lot of the Disney movies we grew up with, you’d hear these rumors that kind of dirty perversions have seeped their way into them. They just can’t help it.�

The version of the orgy in “Sausage Party� is actually toned-down from an earlier, eight-minute-long one, Rogen said: “The first version was truly the grossest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life. There was a lot more fluids involved: a lot of mayonnaise.�

He laughed. “I think the MPAA didn’t know how to handle food. It crossed over into some unprecedented territory.�

“Sausage Party� hits theaters Aug. 12.

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