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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