“Animators are pent-up people,” jokes Rogen.

With Sausage Party, Seth Rogen and company created an animated film for adults that became one of the most crass, gross-out animated movies ever to hit the big screen. Years later, its small-screen prequel is no less depraved — but Rogen say a lot of the worst stuff got cut out early in the animation process. Praising the animators behind Sausage Party: Foodtopia, Rogen says it’s them who are bringing some of the most bonkers, boundary-pushing energy to the table, and part of his job as a producer is to figure out what might actually work on TV.

This all tracks with an earlier report that there’s a scene so messed up, it had to have a special screening for Amazon.

“There’s a general paring back process that happens, I’d say between the storyboard and the animatics,” Rogen explained. “Animators are pent-up people. They’re forced to work on things for 9-year-olds for most of their careers, I think, a lot of them. So when you tell them ‘Go for it,’ what you get back is truly appalling. That is a process that we are constantly navigating. We’re like ‘Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. This will be registered as evidence one day. We cannot…this is too far,’ and then you scale it back, but generally, honestly, when you tell thee animators to go crazy, it is insane what they deliver, and then you find the middle ground.”

The products at Shopwell’s Grocery Store are made to believe a code that helps them live happy lives until it’s time for them to leave the comfort of the supermarket and head for the great beyond. However, after a botched trip to the great beyond leaves one sausage named Frank and his companion Bun stranded, Frank goes to great lengths (pun intended) to return to his package and make another trip to the great beyond. But as Frank’s journey takes him from one end of the supermarket to the other, Frank’s quest to discover the truth about his existence as a sausage turns incredibly dark. Can he expose the truth to the rest of the supermarket and get his fellow products to rebel against their human masters?

Sausage Party: Foodtopia will arrive in 2024.