A McDonald’s Japan advertisement featuring a family recently went viral on X. Although the ad presents a seemingly innocuous scene of a family eating a meal, some viewers mocked it as being homophobic, transphobic, and racist, and lashed out at artists who reimagined the scene.
The 21-second video advertisement featured an animated family that appears to be heterosexual and white. The father was having chicken McNuggets while the mother fed their daughter fries, and the video ends with the family laughing and looking at each other. The ad also included the caption “it’s not special, it’s just happy time” and soothing background music.
It garnered over a hundred million views within a week. Tens of thousands rushed to the comments, reposts, and quotes sections. Most were fans of the ad, finding the family adorable and the atmosphere pleasant. Many hoped McDonald’s would use similar commercials in other markets.
“Need an Americanized version of this commercial,” reads one comment that received thousands of likes.
“The reason this ad blew up is because it’s alien to us, for the West is no longer capable of producing basic messaging that speaks to the core of being human,” another said, prompting someone to respond, “I agree fully. Amazing ad, brought me into a vibe and nostalgia where responsibility wasn’t so heavy!”
Others weren’t impressed.
“If I’m not reminded that being straight and white are literally evil and promoting minority murder, I can’t eat there,” one critic posted.
Digital illustrator Stan Glass came across the advertisement after it went viral online. He’s fond of animation and thought recreating it could be good practice for his linework skills, so he spent 45 minutes redrawing the picture. He replaced the heterosexual parents with two dads. After posting his reimagined version, he received an avalanche of hateful comments and even death threats.
“I really like the style and I want to see if I can replicate the line work, the background elements to match the original style, and I thought that would be a really fun study purpose,” Glass, whose portfolio is centered on homosexuality, told the Daily Dot.
“Mostly like people were salivating at this idea that my artwork is a validation of this imaginary war that they made up, ‘See? The liberals are angry,’ ‘They can’t stand not being part of our traditional family values that have to replace themselves into it,’” Glass said. At some point, he had to filter comments and turn off his comment section on TikTok. “I was like, where did I ever say I was angry at that original ad? I just threw it in like, here, these are cute little redraws.”
A dozen other artists also posted redrawn pictures of the ad. Some included scenes of LGBTQ families; others integrated characters from anime games. Some of these posts are an apparent reaction to the hate-fueled culture war over LGBTQ issues and inclusion. One of the most liked artworks turned the father into a faceless man, a character in the cinematic narrative game Goodbye Volcano High, which tells the story of a rejected man who escaped from reality and embarked on a journey to find love and his true self.
Glass posted another redraw two days later in the “Yaoi and Yuri” style, a comic genre meaning “boy’s love” and “girl’s love” in Japanese.
“A lot of people were being angry on behalf of the Japanese people, I don’t understand this idea,” Glass said. “They also have artwork revolving around the LGBT community in some capacity.”
“It’s a distasteful era when expressing the happiness and joy of family in commercials can lead to complaints,” another comment posted in the original advertisement thread.
The number of views of the video continued rising for a week after it was posted. As of this writing, it has been viewed 142 million times.
McDonald’s hasn’t released any statement regarding the advertisement or the heated discussion it inspired. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
