It's 4th of July weekend at Shopwell's grocery store, and the food products long for the opportunity to be taken out of the store by their gods (the humans) away to the Great Beyond. However, as they soon find out, humans eat food, and it's up to a hot dog named Frank (Seth Rogen) to expose the truth and convince the produce to fight back for their own survival.
While it maintains the aesthetic of a children's movie akin to Pixar and DreamWorks, this film carries an R rating for good reason. Even without the swearing, there's all sorts of crude humor and offensive stereotypes that should be a huge tip-off that this film is not family friendly. (Toiletries and hygiene products are sentient as well.)
A nice trick is that from the food's perspective, the movie is bright and colorful. But when we're shown the point of view of the humans, the colors are more muted and the food's anthropomorphism is gone. While the trailers give away quite a bit, they managed to avoid this detail, as well as hiding the true antagonist.
But beneath the film's vulgarity and darkness, there's a lot of heart and hope that's generally found in most computer animated features. Frank and his love interest, a hot dog bun named Brenda (Kristen Wiig) have good chemistry. There's a subplot between a seemingly Jewish bagel (Edward Norton) and a seemingly Muslim flatbread (David Krumholtz) who hate each other, but still join Frank and Brenda on the way back to their aisles (a sort of Incredible Journey). Over the course of their time together, they find some common ground and form a close relationship. There's also a taco (Salma Hayek) who wants to be loved by Brenda who comes across as very sympathetic. You begin to like these characters and hope they don't get eaten.
There's also a lot of focus on Barry (Michael Cera), a smaller hot dog who has to find his way back to the grocery store and reunite with Frank. Both characters learn the truth in different ways, and when Frank fails to convince the foods that the gods can be defeated, Barry and the foods he met along the way come through with the solution.
The climax is actually pretty inspiring in a similar way to A Bug's Life, showing strength in numbers and that by working together against overwhelming odds, anything can be accomplished...Then it gets weird...and then it gets meta.
So while this is an enjoyable film, I'm hesitant to recommend it for obvious reasons. Depending on your tastes, you'll either laugh all the way through, or might gag at some of the more obscene bits, and probably lose your appetite either way. After the opening song, it does take some time to get going again, but once it picks up it's god. I hope more adult animated movies get made as a result of this. While there are stories of difficulties behind the scenes with the animation staff, it's clear that the writers and voice actors had an absolute blast making this film, and the hard work of everyone involved should be recognized.
