Sweet Dreams: an immersive multimedia exhibition that plays chicken with our take on fast food

 “I was in Tbilisi, Georgia where I saw a cartoon mascot of a rooster running with a roast chicken on a plate,” recalls Robin McNicholas, the director of immersive exhibition specialists Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF). “And I remember thinking, it’s so weird, like celebrating cannibalism. How is this possibly a tantalizing offer to buy something inside this particular takeaway? But at the same time, it says a lot about who we are and our relationship to food.”

That one image helped spark a ten-year journey to MLF’s new project, Sweet Dreams, in collaboration with Factory International, with funding and development from the BFI. Sweet Dreams charts the fortunes of one Chicky Ricky (voiced by actor and comedian Munya Chawawa), a cartoon mascot disillusioned with his role promoting Real Good Chicken Company (RGC) meals. Across a series of rooms in Manchester’s state-of-the-art, multi-purpose Aviva Studios, audiences join Chicky Ricky as he investigates his ultimate purpose, and interrogates the cognitive dissonance of our fast-food appetites. It’s a surreal, interactive experience bursting with vibrant pop-culture art and animation.

McNicholas sees Sweet Dreams as an extension of MLFs already much-lauded work. Most recently, they premiered at Cannes with XR experience Evolver, tracing the human body’s ecosystems, narrated by Cate Blanchett and executive produced by Terrence Malick. However, constructing a first-ever feature-length, multi-faceted experience was a genuinely evolutionary step for the company.

“We’re positioned in this unique space that that can allow us to cherry pick from theatre, from film, from gaming, in terms of the animation production, and virtual production,” McNicholas explains. “There’s a real balance in terms of moving image and these theatrical sets that take a lot of refining to coexist. Tactility and giving audiences a sense of what our characters and the story world feel like, is a key part of this experience.”

Stepping into the sixty-minute experience takes a participant through a series of ingenious, intricately detailed locations, that convincingly build the history of an alternate fast-food world. Vintage posters and commercials, even ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’-style RGC mixtapes, show the company – and Chicky Ricky’s –­ changing faces and sales strategies across the decades. The rooms themselves include a Heath Robinson-esque factory farm work centre where you take control of the conveyor belt process, and a feathered friend’s funeral service in a chapel with stained glass windows (the eulogy taken, naturally, from Shakespeare’s ‘Omelette’). 

Facts that doubtless fuel fast-food’s ruthless production are delivered with self-aware irony: “crispy” is the word that boosts sales the most; the bigger a mascot’s eyes, the more units they help shift. And there’s plenty of barbed social commentary throughout. At one point, animated character The Boss (voiced by comedian Reggie Watts) bemoans the fact that “There’s a new chain everywhere called Food Bank. They don’t have a mascot, but they seem to be taking away part of our clientele…”

For writer Simon Wroe, himself a former chef, the script process was always “story, story, story”. Wroe cites Pinocchio, specifically the original Carlo Collodi novel, as an inspiration, though given his creation’s animated form, it’s no stretch to also see elements of Woody and Buzz from Toy Story in Ricky’s existential identity crisis.

With a solid, hero’s journey structure in place, what Sweet Dreams also offered Wroe was the possibility to dream up more tangible, tangential elements. “I’d also be writing the placards for props or thinking about the kind of visual elements as a sort of immersive audience experience, not just simply a dramatic one,” he notes. “How you can use those experiential effects to enhance narrative or bring you closer to a character, all those things that good old pen and paper has been trying to do for years.”

Speaking of pen and paper, the actual design for Chicky Ricky, his one-time girl sidekick Penny Peckish (voiced by comedian Morgana Robinson) and pretty much all the other 2D animation fell to renowned French artist McBess (Matthieu Bessudo), who was brought in relatively late on the project and, astonishingly, came up with Sweet Dreams’s artwork in just six months.

“The beauty of working inside a whole universe of fast foods, is that it’s something we’ve all known for a long time,” says McBess. “I must’ve been going to McDonald’s since I was six or seven [years old], so, you know, you’re marked with a lot of texture, and colours and patterns.” 

There are some neat absurdist touches (or, “haunted Disney”, as Wroe calls it): Penny Peckish’s legs are bendable drinking straws; and The Boss’s head is an actual old-school Rolodex, whose pages flip as he bellows orders. “The idea was a corporate monster and I felt like, okay, what’s on the office desk?” McBess outlines. “Is his head a stapler? And then I thought, the Rolodex is something that’s never been used in the home, it’s always been just for business, right? So, it carries even more that corporate identity.”

Given the subject matter, there’s clearly the possibility baked into Sweet Dreams, to condemn our savoury menu choices, particularly the way that the fast-food industry serves up animal products. What’s interesting, then, is how the experience rarely, if ever, feels like a simple vegan-inspired polemic. And, according to the creators, even if the project wants to take us inside the industry’s practices, avoiding an overtly accusatory stance towards consumers is clearly by design.

“It’s really about realising that our relationship to food has a buffer, and that buffer is often a smiling cartoon that deflects our sense of what the ingredients are,” observes McNicholas. “But certainly, it gets the emotions and the hunger primed.”

“We don’t want to lecture people about this stuff,” asserts Wroe, “but I think there’s a sense that these corporations, through this mascot kind of marketing, manipulate us more than we have ever sort of signed up to… We’re all on some level hypocrites, the creators of this show as much as anyone.” 

At this point, the tattoo McBess has across his right hand’s knuckles, the letters M-E-A-T, comes sharply into focus. “I used to eat a lot of meat,” he shrugs, “so ever since I moved to London, it’s been a gradual kind of learning experience. But I also know that it is so easy when, you know, you don’t have money problems to eat well and to buy nice products. I think what the show critiques the most is actually the marketing.”

Adds Wroe, with a wry smile, “I feel like if you can come out [of Sweet Dreams] and be perhaps slightly more conscious of your habits, you’re still fully entitled to make bad decisions!”

• Sweet Dreams runs at the Aviva Studios in Manchester until 1 September (Tuesday to Sunday).