Sausage Party has plenty to celebrate: it’s the first-ever R-rated CG-animated feature film; it’s the latest highly-anticipated offering from homegrown millennial tastemakers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (This is the End; Superbad); it contains a food orgy (and isn’t that last fact alone worthy of celebration?).
If Sausage Party sounds like the raunchy, raucous, R-rated animated food fiesta you’ve been craving, you can thank Vancouver’s Nitrogen Studios for the invitation.
The Downtown Eastside animation studio created all of the animation for the 88-minute feature film, which was written by Rogen, Goldberg, Kyle Hunter, and Ariel Shaffir, and co-directed by Conrad Vernon (Shrek 2, Monsters vs. Aliens) and Nitrogen’s own Greg Tiernan. The film was produced by Nitrogen and Point Grey Pictures, financed by Annapurna Pictures, and will soon be distributed by Columbia Pictures.
Sausage Party follows a hapless package of sausages and their pals from a grocery store as they discover the unappetizing truth about their existence and take decisive action (also: food orgy).
The characters are voiced by a parade of A-listers – besides Rogen, there’s Jonah Hill, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Salma Hayek, James Franco, Michael Cera, Nick Kroll, and Edward Norton – as well as some accidental actors, like Nitrogen storyboard artist Scott Underwood (who voices a Twinkie) and the Irish-born Tiernan as an Irish potato.
The artists ended up in the film because Sausage Party was an all-hands-on-deck experience for Nitrogen, says Tiernan during Reel People’s recent visit to the company’s 23,000-sq.-ft. full-service animation hive, housed in an old foundry at the corner of Heatley and Powell.
“It’s creativity first. Everybody here has a voice. It doesn’t matter where they are,” says Tiernan, who also serves as Nitrogen’s COO and executive producer. The company – which typically employs approximately 90 artists – ramped up to more than 150 for Sausage Party. “Even on a movie as big as Sausage Party, there are a lot of people here who came up with gags and did voices and all sorts of stuff like that. There’s no point trying to put an artist in a box and not allow them to spread their wings.”
Nitrogen Studios was founded by Tiernan and Vancouver native Nicole Stinn in 2003 to serve the animation needs of a diverse clientele in the film, television, and gaming industries. By that time, the married couple had already amassed a heap of experience in the animation biz, first as artists and then in leadership positions for big entertainment corps in Los Angeles.
Nitrogen started small, says Stinn (Nitrogen CEO, executive producer, and line producer on Sausage Party), so that they could perfect their skills. “We passed by a couple of opportunities early on where the growth would have been too fast, because we decided, ‘let’s just build this slowly,’” says Stinn.
And in so doing, they’ve also intentionally stayed just under the radar, says Tiernan. “We didn’t just appear over night,” says Tiernan. “We’ve been working hard at building up.”
Nitrogen’s biggest gig before Sausage Party was about as un-Sausage Party as it gets: Thomas & Friends. For the CG reboot of the classic children’s series – about an adorable train and his locomotive peers at Tidmouth Sheds – Nitrogen produced 100 episodes, four DVD movies, and a bounty of consumer products.
Although it might seem jarring to have the company behind Thomas & Friends at the helm of the world’s first-ever R-rated CG film, it makes perfect sense to Tiernan.
“To us, it doesn’t matter if it’s R-rated, or if it’s preschool,” he says. “We have our own little preschool show that is even sweeter and skews even younger than Thomas, and we’re quite happy to put R-rated stuff out there as well. We’re in the animation business, so if it’s animated, we want to do it, and we want to do it to the best of our abilities.”
Sausage Party made its way to Nitrogen via Tiernan’s old friend, Vernon, who’d directed Rogen in Monsters vs. Aliens.
“Conrad said, ‘Listen, I have a Seth Rogen project that you guys might be interested in,’ and I was like, ‘We’re fans of Seth Rogen’s, that’s great,’ and he said, ‘The premise is it’s about sausages who want to get out of their packages and fuck buns.’” Tiernan laughs at the memory. “And I was like, ‘Wow, okay, we’re in.’”
One point that made Sausage Party highly attractive to the Nitrogen team was that Rogen and Goldberg envisioned it as a live-action film told with animated characters, says Stinn.
“The script, the sensibility, the timing, the cutting, the camera work, it all has this live-action feel to it,” says Stinn – which is why Sausage Party “doesn’t look like any other animated movie out there,” says Tiernan.
The scale and scope of the film is far more nuanced than the red-band trailers might suggest, says Tiernan. “All of us, together, we wanted to make sure that this movie had heart and more depth,” says Tiernan. Of course, “[there] is a lot of flat-out, slapstick comedy and raunchy, raucous laughter, so for people who want that, they won’t be disappointed.”
Nitrogen is currently working with Dreamworks on Trollhunters, an original series for Netflix, and developing their own feature film scripts.
“I think there are so many opportunities for new properties, whether it’s for families or adults,” says Stinn.
They’re also enjoying the buzz leading up to Sausage Party’s theatrical release after a wildly successful Comic-Con screening. “It’s the first R-rated CGI big movie ever, and it’s coming out of the Downtown Eastside,” says Tiernan. “We’re incredibly proud of that. We want to keep building on that.”
• Sausage Party hits theatres nationwide on Aug. 12.
