Beautiful animated film 'The Scarecrow' takes aim at factory farming

And perhaps most surprisingly of all, it's an ad for a US fast food company.

US fast food company Chipotle Mexican Grill has done something quite remarkable with its new marketing campaign.

The tacos'n'burritos firm - which boasts the tagline 'food with integrity' has introduced a new interactive game exploring the theme of sustainable food production.

The accompanying short film, 'The Scarecrow' has gone viral, and rightly so. It's a thing of beauty, with a soundtrack featuring Fiona Apple giving a haunting rendition of 'Pure Imagination', from the 1971 film classic “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Watch it below, it's really worth the three minutes or so.

"In a dystopian fantasy world, all food production is controlled by fictional industrial giant Crow Foods. Scarecrows have been displaced from their traditional role of protecting food, and are now servants to the crows and their evil plans to dominate the food system.

"Dreaming of something better, a lone scarecrow sets out to provide an alternative to the unsustainable processed food from the factory."

Created in partnership with Academy Award-winning Moonbot Studios, is meant "to help people better understand the difference between processed food and the real thing," says Mark Crumpacker, chief marketing officer at Chipotle.

“In a system that is so heavily dominated by industrial agriculture and factory farms, we are committed to finding better, more sustainable sources for all of the ingredients we use and to helping build a better food system, much the same as the character in ‘The Scarecrow’ is taking important steps to fix what he perceives as being broken in his world.”

Yes, it's marketing.

But it's clever marketing.