Sausage Party May Look Cute, but Leave the Kids at Home

Rating: R, for strong crude sexual content, pervasive language, and drug use.

You’ve probably figured it out already from the R rating, but I just wanted to make it really, super clear how thoroughly inappropriate Sausage Party is for your kids. It looks cute, though, right? All those happy, smiling hot dogs and buns, tacos and jars of honey mustard – how harmful could they be? Your kids will probably beg you to take them to see it, given that it’s animated and colorful and it’s about talking food. My son, who’s almost 7, whines to me in the car as we drive around Los Angeles every day, seeing billboards and posters for Sausage Party everywhere: “Aww, why can’t I see Sausage Party?” Because it’s a raunchy comedy about food items cursing, drinking, smoking pot and having sex in the grocery store. That’s why. But it’s also an exploration of religious intolerance. Seth Rogen, who co-wrote the script, co-produced, and provided the voice of a hot dog named Frank, clearly has something more substantive and philosophical in mind with the film, which Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan co-directed. But the F-bombs, pot smoke, and bodily fluids swirling around those concepts are just so thick. You’ll probably get a kick out of a lot of the ideas and images here. But your children (and mine) will have to wait.

Rating: PG, for action, peril and brief language.

This is a kinda-sorta remake of the 1977 film of the same name, in that it’s about a boy named Pete and he has a dragon. Orphaned at a very young age, Pete (Oakes Fegley) has been raised in the forest by his only friend: a furry, green dragon he named Elliot. When a forest ranger (Bryce Dallas Howard) discovers him at age 11 and brings him home, he struggles to adjust to civilization, all the while trying to protect his magical friend from loggers who want to capture him for their own glory. This is a wonderful family film; it takes place in the 1970s and feels as if it was made then, too. Director David Lowery is unrushed in his pacing and uses wordless sequences efficiently to tell his story. And the relationship between Pete and Elliot is lovely – full of both frolic and joy as well as quiet, intimate moments. But as I mentioned at the start, Pete an orphan in the classic Disney tradition; in the film’s first few minutes, we see him lose his parents in a car accident that he survives, then wander alone in the woods until he meets Elliot. The sense of loneliness and loss is powerful here and might be too much for very young viewers. Also, a group of loggers take down the dragon using tranquilizer guns and chain him to a flatbed truck, which also could be disturbing. But mostly, I’d say this is fine for viewers around 6 and older.