Sausage Party is this decade's Team America: World Police

Rude, crude and oh so funny

In 2004, three 13-year-olds snuck into their local cinema to see a new comedy from the creators of South Park. The film's plot followed a team of paramilitary policemen, depicted as marionettes, attempting to prevent a terrorist plot from destroying the world.

Opening with a song containing the word "f*ck" 37 times and featuring the most memorable puppet sex scene committed to celluloid, the trio found themselves rolling in the aisles in disbelief of what they were experiencing. The film? Team America: World Police.

One of those teens, now a 25-year-old journalist, recently wandered along to a screening of an entirely new film where he found himself guffawing just as hard as he had been in that cinema screen 12 years previous. If you hadn't already guessed, that person was me and the film was this decade's answer to Trey Parker and Matt Stone's politically-charged satire: it's called Sausage Party.

Now, sure, below the surface, Sausage Party is a very different film from Team America which, for all its mischievous affront, was attempting to provide social commentary on a country that had been stricken by 9/11 just over two years before. Stone and Parker who went on to devise the hugely popular musical The Book of Mormon opted to take down the crème de la crème of Hollywood in the process, with Matt Damon and Michael Moore bearing the brunt.

Instead, Sausage Party, for no real reason, manages to offend almost everyone without directly offending anyone in particular (save for, perhaps, Stephen Hawking). The story follows a group of supermarket foods, led by Seth Rogen's Frank, who are desperate to be purchased so they can fundamentally cop off with each other outside of their packaging. They are, of course, unaware that the paying customers want to consume them.

Like Team America, the film begins with an expletive-addled song you'll be humming for weeks and boasts an entire cast of characters whose very appearances will yank the laughter from you every five minutes; there's Edward Norton's Jewish bagel and Danny McBride's paranoid Honey Mustard not to mention a lesbian taco voiced by Salma Hayek. From the minds of Superbad's Rogen and Evan Goldberg – the duo behind AMC series Preacher – and a co-writing credit for Jonah Hill, Sausage Party feels very much like the result of three mates shooting the breeze down the boozer after eight pints.

Don't let its existence as an animated comedy fool you; Sausage Party is strictly for adults. It's films like this and Team America that make age restrictions worthwhile, preventing children from convincing their parents to take them to see "that funny film that has the poster with the cute looking sausage on it" – trust that this one-sheet incessantly belies the film's content.

At Team America's time of release, there was similarly no telling that the film wasn't simply a tween-friendly Thunderbirds spin-off (aside from the reviews) just as much as there's no initial understanding that Sausage Party isn't just the latest family-friendly Pixar outing: they've had toys, rats and litter-picking robots – why not supermarket foods? Alarmingly, several European countries – namely Sweden – have given these films an age certificate which permits kids as young as seven to see the film assisted by an adult – a scandalous notion when considering the film's climax (no pun intended).

To divulge on this climax would be to spoil the film's surprise; just know there's an extended sequence that'll be on everybody's lips when the film arrives in cinemas on 2 September. It's this moment that will see the words Sausage Party permeating around secondary school playgrounds in the same way thatTeam America did when I was a schoolkid.

Every now and then, these types of films arrive to tickle the curiosity of those too young to see them; Sausage Party is such a film. The ultimate punchline of this whole shebang, however, is that my younger brother – now the same age as I was when I snuck into Team America – is probably plotting to see Sausage Party this weekend. God help him if my Mum finds out.