Sausage Party  ★★★

YOU can just imagine Seth Rogen and his mates coming up with the ideas for Sausage Party 20-odd years ago.

It would have taken copious inhalation of various substances to come up with this stuff and they would have thought it was all absolutely hilarious.

What if food could talk? What if food had feelings? What if food didn’t realise it would be eaten? What if foods thought we were murdering them by eating them? What if food fought back? What if this was all in a cartoon? We would absolutely watch that!

You get the drift. Sausage Party (2016) is an animated, adult, stoner comedy that Rogen and John Hill thought would still be hilarious because it was 20 years ago.

And guess what? If you can get past the constant drug and sex references and swearing, it mostly still is.

In fact some of the lunacy is quite genius. A trolley crash with foods spilling to the floor is given ‘Saving Private Ryan’ like treatment of the devastation caused; the testy relationship between a lavash and a bagel is likened to the Arab-Israeli conflict; and, best of all, the seeming worthlessness of chewing gum is given new meaning.

It’s only 80-odd minutes long and there are still some sections that drag, but the sheer volume of jokes and topical scenarios packed into the remainder makes for a fun, satisfying experience that you won’t see in animated film very often.

The voice cast is a roll-call of current film comic talent, including Rogen, Hill, Michael Cera, Danny McBride, Paul Rudd, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, as well as Edward Norton, Salma Hayek and James Franco.

I won’t tell you the characters they voice as that’s one of the other main attractions of the film.

If your expectations are low – and you aren’t offended by an animated food sex orgy – you should find this a pleasant surprise.