HOTDOGS WITH A LOT OF SAUCE!

It’s definitely not one for the children, but I was laughing out loud at this unashamedly rude food

Sausage Party (15) Verdict: Funny, but relentlessly obscene ★★★✩✩ Café Society (12A) Verdict: Middling Woody Allen ★★★✩✩

THE movies long ago cottoned on to the idea of giving human voices and emotions to animals, and in time moved on to toys, cars, even planes. But not many filmmakers have thought to create a parallel universe in which foodstuffs have personalities. It’s a peachy idea, and it is realised uproariously in Sausage Party, yet with truly outrageous vulgarity.

You would hardly think it possible to quibble about a 15 certificate being inadequate for an animated film in which sausages talk to buns and bagels.

But it is positively marinated in obscenity and I wouldn’t particularly want to see it with my children. It’s not like they’re in the early throes of adolescence, either. The youngest is about to go to university.

The story is largely set in an American supermarket, Shopwells, where all the food items yearn to be chosen by the ‘gods’ (ie humans) and carried to the ‘Great Beyond’ (out of the store’s sliding doors).

They have seen this happening to their brethren, and assume they are destined for some kind of paradise.

But then a customer returns a battered jar of honey mustard, who duly drops the bombshell that it’s carnage out there; slicings, skinnings, choppings and other forms of torture, prior to being eaten alive. ‘ Banana’s whole face was peeled off . . . peanut butter’s wife is dead!’

All this is particularly bad news for Frank, a sexually frustrated frankfurter trapped in his plastic packaging (voiced by Seth Rogen, whose original idea this film was and who is also one of the writers).

He longs for a liaison with a sexy hotdog bun, Brenda (Kristen Wiig), and promisingly they’re both in a trolley on the way to the exit when the honey mustard breaks the bad news.

The ensuing chaos causes the trolley to crash, and a bag of flour bursts over all the other products — an accident brilliantly rendered by directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan as a sort of nuclear winter. Indeed, there is a great deal of brilliance in Sausage Party, which is at its considerable best when obviously parodying the jolly anthropomorphising of Pixar films.

Moreover, the contents of the supermarket aisles enable no end of clever racial, geopolitical and even theological gags.

I loved the bitter squabbling over shelf room between the Jew- ish, Woody Allen-ish bagel and the Arabic flatbread, who misguidedly thinks there are 77 bottles of extra virgin olive oil waiting for him in the Great Beyond.

And I confess to laughing out loud at the German mustard, presented as a goose- stepping Nazi, who wants to ‘exterminate the juice’.

It’s not always helpful to watch a film and imagine the writers having fits of hilarity coming up with ideas. You want to think of them toiling painfully, so that we might have all the laughs.

But it is irresistible to picture the fun they must have had dreaming up a lesbian taco and a rock- star meat loaf, and the hoots that doubtless rang out when they thought of yet another pun or movie reference.

‘They call me Mister Grits!’ thunders a ( clearly African-American) packet of grits, a nod to the steamy racial tension in the classic 1967 film In The Heat Of The Night.

I got a lot of pleasure from Sausage Party, though not as much pleasure as the foodstuffs derive from the frenzied concluding orgy (hence the film’s title), once they have outwitted those fiendish gods planning their destruction.

SO WHY only three stars? I think it’s because the relentless naughtiness eventually wore me down, and I couldn’t help wishing that it were less rude, and more child-friendly.

After all, tell the nation’s youngsters that there are families of potatoes left bereaved every time they eat a packet of crisps and it could do more than any government initiative to solve Britain’s obesity crisis.

FROM a bagel that talks like Woody Allen to the real thing,

Cafe Society offers a reminder, as if we need one, that the 80-yearold auteur rarely finds anything new to say any more. Still, at least here he laces his favourite