People have a tendency to lump movies together based on how they look. The TVTropes page “All Animation Is Disney” contains plenty of examples. It resulted in a generation of children being traumatized by Watership Down being stocked in the kiddie section of video rental stores, and now the ol’ ignorance has struck again.
Up to this point anything that looks like a CG animated comedy has been targeted at a family audience, so perhaps we can grant the clueless projectionist a little slack when he mistakenly loaded Seth Rogen’s upcoming R-rated comedy Sausage Party into the lineup of trailers that played before a showing of Finding Dory in California. That being said, he really should have watched the thing first. Or looked at the title.
Sausage Party is a satire of the now-well-worn “secret lives of animals/vegetables/minerals/whatever” plot that many, many animated movies have used over the past 20 years. It’s about a sausage that discovers people buy food from grocery stores with the intent of eating it. Unlike most of these stories, Sausage Party goes into some dark, dark places — but that’s the joke.
The joke was on parents and their children, however, when THIS appeared before Dory (warning: NSFW):
Walter Eichinger is the vice president of operations at Brenden Concord 14, and tried to explain the incident was a complete fluke, most likely caused by switching some screens around at the last minute to pack in more families coming to see the Pixar film. “The wrong movie was started by mistake. It was caught soon, but not until the trailer played. We regret it, apologize for it, and we are not happy that it happened.” Eichinger went on to say the trailer was never officially scheduled to play there.
Sausage Party comes out August 12, when I assume this same mistake will be made only on the parental side of things.
