Although 2016 saw the release of a ton of great family friendly animation, we will never forget the one animated film that we will never, EVER show our kids. Sausage Party took the concept of animation to an entirely new realm by slapping its story with a hard-R rating and telling an utterly bizarre tale full of thinly veiled religious satire. It was an awesome movie going experience, but one scene set in a liquor aisle was apparently a technical nightmare for the filmmakers. Director Conrad Vernon explained:
The most challenging one, technically, was the liquor aisle, because not only did we have hundreds and hundreds of bottles and cans, and different sizes and shapes, but we also needed some of them to be see-through, how was it going to look like a liquid is in there? We lit all that really dark, with some really fluorescent type of lights. I think we were going for Bourbon Street, at about 11 o'clock at night, for the liquor aisle. All these reflections had to reflect off of the glass bottles. So technically, that was a pretty difficult sequence.
During a recent interview with Deadline, Conrad Vernon explained the difficulties of filming the liquor aisle sequence seen in Sausage Party. Although animation is generally difficult in every stage of production, the liquor aisle presented a distinctly difficult challenge because of the sheer number of transparent bottles. Additionally, there was the added challenge of the various liquids shown in each bottle while also getting the lighting right for them all. Compared to the rest of the film, it simply presented an onslaught of minor challenges and technical hurdles.
Ultimately the hard work seems to have paid off. Sausage Party was a box office hit, and it garnered a very respectable 84% rating on Rotten Tomatoes when it debuted in August. The film is a huge step forward for adult animation (particularly in a year defined by animated kids movies like Finding Dory, Zootopia, and Moana), and it's one of the strongest comedic satires in recent memory.
Aside from that, the scene simply looks excellent. Check out a shot from the sequence below:
They definitely nailed the Bourbon Street aesthetic, and that's one of many awesome set pieces that made the film look so amazing.
That being said, while the liquor aisle scene was the hardest scene from a technical standpoint, the Mexican aisle scene was apparently the most difficult scene to nail down from a storytelling standpoint. The sequence was rewritten a number of different times to feature a number of different characters until the production finally landed on a version of the scene that worked for them. It goes to show the amount of work and stress that goes into even the most minor film scenes.
CinemaBlend will bring you all of the latest and greatest movie news as more information becomes available to us. Sausage Party is currently available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD.
